tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287Sat, 01 Aug 2015 06:59:23 +0000http://bp0.blogger.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/Rl5bJxutpGI/AAAAAAAAAAM/obsvPiVqNAg/s1600-h/images2.jpgPeter Yared's MusingsHi, I&#39;m the founder &amp; CTO at <a href="http://sapho.com">Sapho</a> and a tech blogger, most recently for TechCrunch, VentureBeat and WSJ. Previously CTO/CIO at CBS Interactive and founder of four enterprise infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, Webtrends and TigerLogic.http://peteryared.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)Blogger190125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-2801903820908836548Thu, 16 Jul 2015 00:35:00 +00002015-07-18T17:36:36.329-07:00How Twitter Lost the Stream Wars<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/15/how-twitter-lost-the-stream-wars/"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/TAil87OOncI/AAAAAAAAAPs/3kdYjex8A_E/s400/venture+beat+logo.png" border=0><br />This post was also published in VentureBeat.</a> <p>Unlike other category-defining Internet companies, Twitter has struggled to meet both user growth metrics and Wall Street’s expectations. There are a lot of possible explanations for Twitter’s user growth problems, but they really boil down to one simple thing: As the content shared into streams grows exponentially, the streams have to get smarter in order to remain relevant to users.</p><p>Twitter presents cards in a straight reverse chronological stream that shows all content. The more people you follow and the more you use Twitter, the worse the Twitter experience becomes.</p> <center><img border="0" width="650" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ki6muL_Jqa8/VarwnmQ62nI/AAAAAAAAA3w/3i2UU-BEN7c/s1600/dumb-vs-smart-streams.jpg" /></center> <p>Facebook took a very different tack. Back in 2008, Mark Zuckerberg established <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/zuckerbergs-law-of-information-sharing/">Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing</a>, which predicted that the rate people share information like status updates and photos would double every year. In 2009, Facebook acquired <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/10/facebook-to-acquire-friendfeed/">Friendfeed for $50 million</a>, integrating a team that was using content shared from external sites to learn what users liked and didn’t like. In 2011 and 2012, Facebook poached data science teams from across Silicon Valley to build an increasingly intelligent rules engine called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeRank">EdgeRank</a> that figured out what posts to show to which user in what order.</p> <p>Users complained every time there was a change, but Facebook’s relentless focus paid off. Now in 2015, Facebook’s stream automatically notices how long it’s been since you’ve last looked, what types of content you’re interested in, what you like, what you click, and figures out who your close friends are to showcase their content. The Facebook ranking algorithm is constantly tweaked and optimized by an <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-acquired-artificial-intelligence-company-whetlab-2015-6">increasingly large machine intelligence team</a>. On Facebook, the more people you follow, the better the experience gets as it increases signals to the stream algorithm. The Facebook stream has become so good that brand content is increasingly filtered out, so Facebook has just added a <a href="http://marketingland.com/facebook-lets-people-choose-what-they-see-first-in-the-news-feed-134651">SeeFirst option</a> that lets people opt-in to brand content.</p> <p>Google also foresaw that the exponential deluge of information would overwhelm users and in 2011 began to work on Google Now to predict what people would be interested in as a stream of cards; it subsequently shut down other personalized Google attempts like iGoogle. Google Now launched in 2012 and after three years of iterations offers an extremely advanced interface that infers things you need to know, ranging from where you parked your car to fresh information about items you have searched. Google has been very proactive about placing <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/14/googles-push-past-search/">Google Now before you search and answer cards above search results</a>.</p> <p>Conversely to Facebook and Google, Twitter has stuck with a straight temporal stream that shows all content no matter how irrelevant. Attempts to overlay features such as the Discover tab and a “while you were gone” view did not change how the main Twitter stream works: a torrent of information that quickly slides both interesting and silly posts into obscurity. Attempts to introduce threaded conversations created replicas of conversations on the same stream.</p> <p>Twitter’s Dick Costolo recently lamented being too focused on <a href="http://time.com/3943004/dick-costolo-wall-street/">short-term thinking to appease Wall Street</a>. Exhibit #1 was the relentless effort to have users follow more people on Twitter. The early product team at Twitter discovered patterns that indicated if you followed at least <a href="https://medium.com/growth-hacker/reading-josh-elman-on-growth-6d379a6c153d">30 people</a>, you were likely to remain engaged. So they redesigned the product to drive this behavior. Somehow this blossomed into a constant effort to get every user to follow more people. Yes, it was an easy engagement number to show Wall Street. However, the more people you follow on Twitter, the worse the experience.</p> <p>With mobile usage surpassing desktop usage, the constraints of a mobile screen make stream optimization critical. The most relevant and actionable cards need to be on the top.</p> <p>Although many commenters seem to think that switching to a Flipboard or Nuzzle style view would help, Facebook, Google, and others have proven that a stream interface with cards really performs. The real problem Twitter needs to solve is ranking whose posts are important to whom and how well the content is received. Twitter has been acquiring some machine learning teams, but is it too little too late? Perhaps not.</p> <p>The first step is to remove the bad actors, as Twitter is a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/fashion/social-media-bots-offer-phony-friends-and-real-profit.html">veritable bot farm</a>. The second step is sorting the Twitter stream by relevance, with an option to switch between relevant and temporal posts, just like Facebook did years ago. After a bit of weening, nobody cares about the real time feed anymore. Once this switch is made, there is plenty of runway to iterate with users and test what works and doesn’t work. The third step is to aggregate similar posts together so that there is context and the stream doesn’t overflow with similar content.</p><p>Twitter has become the newswire of our generation, with everything from breaking news such a revolutions, interesting content, and celebrity crosstalk. Twitter just needs to be sorted into a modern stream, and the user growth and Wall Street accolades will follow.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2015/07/how-twitter-lost-stream-wars.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-8541541411379394333Mon, 15 Jun 2015 06:23:00 +00002015-06-17T17:43:32.159-07:00Regulating the Sharing Economy: How Uber et al Will Soon Face New Rules<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/14/regulating-the-sharing-economy-how-uber-et-al-will-soon-face-new-rules/"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/TAil87OOncI/AAAAAAAAAPs/3kdYjex8A_E/s400/venture+beat+logo.png" border=0><br />This post was also published in VentureBeat.</a> <p/><center><img border="0" width="650" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0j2NOXJiJL8/VX5vHDNlhFI/AAAAAAAAA3U/BUYUd-CTmKE/s1600/uber-car-jason-tester-guerilla-futures-flickr.jpg" /></center> <p>Uber’s <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/3/8726027/uber-5th-birthday-party-travis-kalanick">fifth year anniversary</a> highlights that sharing economy services have rapidly become persistent and mainstream. Uber facilitates over <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/12/17/uber-says-its-doing-1-million-rides-per-day-140-million-in-last-year/">one million rides a day</a>. It’s estimated Airbnb will make <a href="http://skift.com/2015/03/25/airbnbs-revenues-will-cross-half-billion-mark-in-2015-analysts-estimate/">$6 billion in gross bookings in 2015</a>.</p> <p>Legacy regulatory environments were first ignored and then fell by the wayside or changed as people recognized that a customer-reviewed driver in a personal modern car was just as good, if not better, than a sociopath in a yellow Crown Victoria. However, Uber drivers are now congesting major cities, and neighbors of Airbnb-listed rentals don’t want to live <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/news/airbnb-is-infuriating-the-neighbors-is-it-time-for-new-rules-5343663">adjacent to what is effectively a hotel</a>.</p> <p>As the adage goes, bureaucracies are created to solve a real problem, actually address the problem, and then simply sustain themselves. There is no doubt that taxi commissions and hotel regulations have far exceeded that threshold. Jurisdictions like Las Vegas that forbid street-side pickups in conjunction with hotels that only allowed a single cab to load at a time conspired to make changing locations incredibly difficult for consumers. Regulations mandating that the rack rate for a hotel room be placed inside a room make no sense in an Internet-enabled world.<br />However, as sharing economy services have reached scale, the need for regulatory intervention is increasingly becoming apparent, in numerous areas:</p> <p><h3>Congestion</h3> Having no upper bound on the number of vehicles available is leading to massive congestion in the downtowns of major cities. For example, San Francisco has <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/3/8726027/uber-5th-birthday-party-travis-kalanick">22,000 possible Uber drivers,</a> and its legacy taxi industry is limited to <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/In-the-days-of-Uber-Lyft-some-still-buy-S-F-6038188.php">1,900 medallions</a>. Clearly San Francisco needed more taxis, with the medallion system enriching existing owners with artificial scarcity rather than reasonably limiting the number of vehicles permitted to ferry passengers. On one hand, in aggregate there is <a href="http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/11/12/studies-show-car-traffic-in-san-francisco-is-dropping/">less traffic in San Francisco at key intersections</a>, very likely due to a combination of <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/12/la-neighborhood-blames-waze-app-for-morning-traffic-jam/" target="_blank">Waze distributing the load to side streets</a> and people using ride sharing rather than driving their own cars. On the other hand, during surge times downtown is at a virtual standstill. Ask any ride sharing driver and they will tell you it’s Uber and Lyft drivers. In the near future, cities will likely add caps to the number of concurrent Uber and Lyft drivers as part of a mandatory regulatory license. Such caps will likely create scarcity and increase rates.</p> <p><h3>Bad Drivers</h3>Uber drivers are now as notorious as taxis for illegal U turns and arbitrarily double parking when they could just as easily pull over. Due to driver ratings when carrying passengers, they are better drivers than taxis, but <a href="http://www.thebolditalic.com/articles/6466-study-finds-taxi-drivers-are-the-worst-drivers">only marginally better</a>. Taxis had very visible markings that allowed consumers to have a recourse. It is not unreasonable that the companies provide visible identifiers that noncustomers could use to rate the drivers. Yes, a "How's My Driving" sticker! This will go a lot farther than trying to see an optional decal in the windshield and capturing a license plate number.</p> <p><h3>Redlining</h3>There is anecdotal evidence that it's very difficult to get an Uber in poor and underserved neighborhoods. With Uber’s driver opt-out model <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/26mik5/dont_buy_the_sharing_economy_hype_airbnb_uber_are/chsgaeq">redlining is going to be par for the course</a> for many drivers. As part of their license, taxi companies were regulated to not redline neighborhoods. However now that taxi companies have become eviscerated by Uber and Lyft, good luck getting any type of ride from underserved neighborhoods. Uber will likely have to create a market-based incentive to address this problem, by perhaps giving the drivers the full fare.</p> <p><h3>People with Disabilities</h3> – Taxi companies are obligated to accommodate people with disabilities, with <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/industry/se_wheel_crit.shtml">specialized wheelchair capable vehicles</a>. Uber is currently being <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/21/uber-disability-laws-don-t-apply-to-us.html">sued in multiple states</a> due to issues with the Americans with Disabilities Act. However, much like with redlining, the evisceration of legacy taxi companies will likely lead to regulations that will force Uber to add drivers with specialized ADA vehicles to its fleet.</p> <p><h3>Insurance</h3>Uber claims that the driver’s personal insurance will cover injury to passengers. <a href="http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/01/20/ride-sharing-insurance-lyft-uberx-sidecar/">However the insurance companies disagree</a> and have created specialized products that drivers must buy. Uber provides a $1 million backup policy, but there is a <a href=http://time.com/money/3901606/uber-lyft-insurance-liability-passengers/">lot of confusion</a> as to when it kicks in. States like California are starting to <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-24/california-says-uber-lyft-vehicles-must-have-commercial-plates">institute stringent insurance requirements</a> that define liability during gray areas like when a driver is waiting for a ride request.</p> <p><h3>Vehicle Standards</h3> – Uber has been largely self-regulating on vehicle standards by insisting on modern vehicles, all of which have numerous mandatory safety features. There is no longer a need for <a href="https://www.municode.com/library/oh/columbus/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TIT5BURELICO_CH591TA_591.08TAVEST">ridiculous standards</a> such as two way radios and credit card swipe machines in the age of the app. Some jurisdictions may mandate a fire extinguisher for paid rides.</p><p><h3>Meter</h3>In order to prevent surprise fares, most jurisdictions have mandated visible meters that continually update during a trip with the current fare. The Uber app lets users see a fare estimate if a destination is entered – it could just as easily show a somewhat current fare. Uber will likely add this feature on its own as it is useful; but if not, it will likely be mandated soon enough by various jurisdictions.</p> <p><h3>Wages</h3>Tax authorities are even going after <a href="https://www.yogaalliance.org/Learn/Article_Archive/California_Targets_Yoga_Studios_Over_Taxes">yoga studios</a> that have regular teachers. Chances are that they will soon force Uber and its ilk to pay employment taxes for its workers.</p> <p>There will, of course, be jurisdictions that overly regulate ride sharing services, much like some jurisdictions like New Jersey still mandate that <a href="http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2014/02/a_brief_history_of_why_you_cant_pump_your_own_gas_in_new_jersey.html">gas can only be full service</a> in order to preserve gas station attendant jobs. Most jurisdictions will likely fall into a reasonable middle ground.</p> <p>It is becoming clear that sharing economy companies are not necessarily going to self-regulate and will increasingly be subject to external regulation now that they are hitting scale. Let’s just hope that the cycle does not repeat into yet another self-profligating bureaucracy that simply recreates all of the same problems companies like Uber were built to address.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2015/06/regulating-sharing-economy-how-uber-et.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-5357570064086629465Sun, 31 May 2015 20:04:00 +00002015-06-13T13:06:17.033-07:00How Tech is Leading us Back to a Village-style Life<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/31/how-tech-is-leading-us-back-to-a-village-style-life/"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/TAil87OOncI/AAAAAAAAAPs/3kdYjex8A_E/s400/venture+beat+logo.png" border=0><br />This post was also published in VentureBeat.</a> <p/><center><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4_GihBa5CZU/VXyM5ManiFI/AAAAAAAAA2E/UuxZ2DvDW68/s1600/artisan.jpg" /></center> <p>There has been a lot of discussion about how the acceleration of technology is <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2975512/Middle-class-decimated-jobs-taken-ROBOTS-web-expert-warns.html">decimating the middle class</a> and <a href="http://www.fastcoexist.com/3042540/futurist-forum/how-the-robots-will-take-your-job-and-kill-the-economy">traditional jobs</a>. But there has been very little discussion of an emerging trend where individuals are opting out of these same jobs people fear will disappear.</p> <p>Driven by a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy">post-scarcity economic model</a> whereby you can live very frugally if you choose to, some workers (mostly college-educated and urban) are opting out of the now traditional work structure and choosing their own path. As Chelsea Rustrum puts it in her book <a href="http://shareablelife.com/"><em>It’s a Shareable Life</em></a>, “You can live a life dictated by choice, passion, and freedom &#8212; a life where your &#8230; experiences are of the highest value.”</p> <p>They are <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/yoga-teacher-career_n_3949026.html">opting into alternative, passion-based professions</a> that have gained popularity and acceptance, such as craft beer producer or yoga teacher, and that have flexible hours. Twenty years ago, if Bob, the valedictorian, showed up to his high school reunion and said he was starting an artisanal coffee shop and manually roasting his own beans, most of the attendees would have laughed and asked each other, “What the heck happened to Bob?” Today, Bob is admired as one of the few that are beginning to embrace the lifestyles of a hundred years ago. Yes, machines can manufacture pretty darn good coffee. But Bob likes to hand roast coffee, and people like to drink it.</p> <p>The economics underlying this shift are of course driven by technology, which has progressively driven down the cost of commodity goods and enabled the easy sharing of capital assets. However, in an ironic twist, technological progress and abundance are ushering in a very retro lifestyle.</p><p>Housing, dining, and even employment are being unbundled into pre-industrial age configurations. Shervin Pishevar, an investor who funded Uber, posited this when he noticed that <a href="http://recode.net/2014/08/04/its-time-for-on-demand/">village services could be implemented at city-wide scales</a>. But perhaps what is actually occurring is the reverse; the cities and services are decentralizing themselves into villages and village-like urban neighborhoods.</p> <p>Some of these trends are already well established, while others such as food carts are of course small micro-trends amongst relatively wealthy city-dwellers.</p><table style="border-collapse: collapse"><tbody><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"></th><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>1920s</b></th><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>2000s</b></th><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>2010s</b></th><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Breakout Company</b></th></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Goods</b><b></b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Local artisans</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Amazon</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Local artisans</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Etsy</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><strong>Coffee</strong></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Local artisans</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Starbucks</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_wave_of_coffee">Local artisans</a></td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Blue Bottle</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Barber</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Local artisans</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Supercuts</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><a href="https://www.americancrew.com/crew-tips/when-men-were-men-re-emergence-classic-barbershops">Local artisans</a></td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">StyleSeat</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Cities</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Villages and urban neighborhoods</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Suburbs</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Villages and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_village">urban villages</a></td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"></td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Personal Transport</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Hitch a ride and pay</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Own a car</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Hitch a ride and pay &#8211; Uber and Lyft</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Uber</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Commuter Transport</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Small shared vehicle</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Mass transit</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Small shared vehicle</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Chariot</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Hotel</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Rent a room in a guest house</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Hotel</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Rent a room in a guest house</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">AirBnB</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Housing</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Small houses</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">McMansions</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_house_movement">Small houses</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/realestate/micro-apartments-tiny-homes-prefabricated-in-brooklyn.html?_r=0">microapartments</a></td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"></td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Spirituality</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Church</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Consumerism</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Yoga and meditation</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">CorePower Yoga</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Work</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Independent craftspeople</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Companies</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><a href="https://tryzen99.com/blog_posts/fast-rise-of-self-employment">Independent contractors</a></td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">oDesk</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Trade</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Barter</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Paypal</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-04-26/rise-of-the-barter-economy">Barter</a> and apps</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"></td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Food</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Local store with local food and neighborhood delivery</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Safeway and factory farms</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Farmer’s markets and local food delivery</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">FreshDirect</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Entertainment</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Local artists</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Pop stars</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><a href="http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/shane-dawson-jenna-marbles-internet-fame-1201271428/">YouTube Stars</a> and local bands</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Maker Studios</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Restaurants</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Small restaurants, many home-based</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Chipotle</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><a href="http://www.ibisworld.com/industry/food-trucks.html">Food carts</a></td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Munchery</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px"><b>Schooling</b></th><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Schoolhouse, Home schooling, Trade apprenticeship</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Factory schools</td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">Charter schools, <a href="http://educationnext.org/home-schooling-goes-mainstream/">Home schooling</a>, <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/34256312">Trade schools</a></td><td style="border: 1px solid white;padding: 5px">AltSchool</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Many of these new services offer very predictable quality due to built-in recommendations or via TripAdvisor or Yelp. Others are very haphazard, like a Burning Man camp during its heyday a few years ago. You can’t buy your way into a top restaurant when it’s a food cart whose owner has everything she needs. She’s much more incentivized to trade her services for a private yoga session, or just simply offer her food to people she already knows and likes.</p><p>The “return to the village” trend is, of course, limited to a small population that can afford to spend their time on personal pursuits and eschew higher wages. This privileged demographic could certainly suck it up and work 12 hours a day, be online every weekend, and live the materialistic American dream – but they now have the luxury of trading less time for less wages, while still meeting their needs and leading excellent lives.</p> <p>In parallel to the great migrations of the Depression era, young, educated people are flocking to cities like <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/mar/02/detroit-michigan-first-steps-urban-renewal">Detroit</a> and <a href="http://gothamist.com/2015/01/28/millennials_buffalo.php">Buffalo</a> to begin a new kind of life. While the 1 percent worries about the new home construction index, others are taking advantage of relatively empty cities and abundant, inexpensive housing. The recent unbundling of healthcare from traditional career-track jobs is only making the opt-out path even more attractive.</p> <p>People spent extremely long hours at work well before the industrial revolution. However, research shows that they actually spent far fewer hours <a href="http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html">actually performing work</a> due to limited light, a lackadaisical work ethic, and numerous religious observances. The shift-based work day schedule developed during the industrial age has lasted well through the information age, and has extended into even longer hours for most knowledge workers. What happened to John Maynard Keynes’ prediction of a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics">15 hour workweek</a> where people’s needs could easily be met with very little work?</p> <p>While we&#8217;re still a long way from a post-scarcity economy, we are already at a point where a large portion of the population no longer works the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation-rate-september-2014-2014-10">traditional 40+ hour work week</a>, and it has become increasingly <a href="http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324492604579087044033601178">difficult to find service workers</a> that can reliably perform monotonous jobs. Perhaps, in the near future, the time-for-wages equation will shift positively and benefit all Americans, well beyond the privileged few that can choose to opt-out and return to a village lifestyle. A world where workers will be empowered to dictate their own hours, their own wages, and most importantly, their own freedom to explore their passions. A massive shift that opens up the opportunity for numerous peer-to-peer services and networks.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2015/05/how-tech-is-leading-us-back-to-village.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-2400670710860148994Tue, 12 May 2015 20:19:00 +00002015-06-13T13:20:48.545-07:00Push Comes To Shove: The New Way We Interact With Information<a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_most_facebook_marketing_doesnt_work.php"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qFv1Z16Lkpk/VXyQT8fke2I/AAAAAAAAA2k/XD5cNkHPwHU/s320/readwrite-logo.jpg" border=0><br />This post was also published in ReadWriteWeb.</a> <p>Since its inception in the 1960s, the modern computer has offered humans the same “pull computing” paradigm: make a query, get a response. Or, as we often experience it: Go to the haystack, try to find the needle.</p> <p>But that’s quickly changing. As software grows more intelligent and learns more about our preferences and behavior, it seemingly gets to know us. That knowledge makes software more valuable because it means that it can deliver things to us, perhaps even before we know we want it. We are at the start of the era of push computing.</p> <p><h3>Pushmi-Pullyu</h3></p> <p>With push computing, a computer is no longer just a question-and-answer service; it’s expected to proactively figure out what’s interesting to you and deliver that data. On mobile, that’s often an actionable stream of cards and timely notifications of important items.</p> <p>Push computing represents a major shift in architecture from the pull relationship computers have long maintained with users. Computing interfaces have evolved from green screens to GUIs to HTML5 to apps, but most applications have the same workflows and address the same needs in a pull-based fashion.</p> <p>Outside the view of users, however, software delivery has steadily evolved toward a push-type model. Just consider how far we've come, from the hosted timesharing of mainframes and minicomputers to dedicated Unix servers to the PC floppy disk and CD and finally to the increasingly prevalent “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service">software-as-a-service</a>” we see today.</p> <p><center><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E4cp2dmAyfg/VXyObYNZHFI/AAAAAAAAA2Q/kRb5yQvsOgs/s1600/MTMwMTI5MDU5NTI1OTYyMzcx.png" /></center></p> <p>Over the past few years, push computing has also begun to infiltrate the interfaces of key consumer apps. Of course, as <a href="http://cdixon.org/2014/12/21/two-eras-of-the-internet-pull-and-push/">Chris Dixon recently pointed out</a>, some Internet services are further along than others. Facebook, for instance, has mastered intelligent news feeds of cards and relevant notifications while Twitter delivers a straight temporal stream that grows more overwhelming the more accounts you follow.</p> <p><h3>Don’t Push Me</h3></p> <p>Not all pushes are the same, after all, and companies have to think carefully about the information that is important to push, when and why it‘s pushed, and how they expect users to react.</p> <p>Major players are also trying to figure out how to make push a central part of the mobile OS. As I wrote a few months ago, <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/14/googles-push-past-search/">Google is aggressively recasting itself as a push player</a> with Google Now and answer cards in search. Apple is decidedly in the pull camp, as Siri is rarely proactive, although the iOS notification manager is well ahead of Android’s. Push has also become the backbone of successful mobile apps powered by real time infrastructure such as <a href="http://pubnub.com/">PubNub</a> and Amazon’s <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/sns/">Simple Notification Service</a>.</p> <p>Machine learning is key to the success of contemporary push-based services. Notifications and cards should only presented to users if they deliver relevant information users can act on easily.</p> <p>Previous attempts to provide user notifications via email failed because email notifications are typically irrelevant and spammy. We’re all well trained to avoid spam like the plague, so users typically dumped all notifications into an email folder and never looked at them at all. Email is also inherently less actionable because a user has to click on a link, log into an application, and then perform an action.</p> <p>For push to work, it’s crucial for applications to make their notifications actionable, friction-free, and rooted in sophisticated machine learning. Early efforts like PointCast to push information were too static and overloaded networks with continual updates.</p> <p><h3>Getting Pushy At Work</h3></p> <p>While push got its start in the consumer realm, the case for business-based push is in many ways much stronger. Enterprise systems manage discrete events that often require urgent action. For example, a sales opportunity might be closing in a CRM system, a complaint from a customer you cover could pop up in the service system, or the HR database could flag you about a new hire you need to onboard.</p> <p>Conversely, the relative importance of events in consumer apps are much more nebulous. To deliver a superior experience to users, Google Now must continually learn, confirm and re-confirm details about where you live, where you work, your calendar, your travel arrangements, your preferences. Peoples’ lives and environs are constantly shifting, making it hard for the new generation of consumer apps to keep up.</p> <p>What is more difficult about enterprise events is that they must be extremely secure and the data is often locked away in a variety of data siloes.</p> <p>As users increasingly expect their services to be intelligent and proactive, push computing is making its way not just to mobile, but also to desktops and laptops by means of browser notifications. The new generation of push software is ushering in a new way for humans to interact with technology, and in the case of the Internet of Things, for technology to interact with itself in the form of networks of “smart” devices.</p> <p>But as digital data becomes more voluminous, our systems have to get more intelligent. They have to filter, analyze, and deliver information to users—and then only when they need to know it or act on it. The goal should always be simple: for the haystack to bring you the needle—whatever it is—before you even start to look for it.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2015/05/push-comes-to-shove-new-way-we-interact.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-8986947257812920789Sat, 09 May 2015 20:28:00 +00002015-05-09T13:28:57.951-07:00Goodbye, SaaS — Hello, Containers-as-a-Service<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/09/goodbye-saas-hello-containers-as-a-service/"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/TAil87OOncI/AAAAAAAAAPs/3kdYjex8A_E/s400/venture+beat+logo.png" border=0><br />This post was also published in VentureBeat.</a> <p>When Salesforce&#8217;s Marc Benioff first started pitching on-demand CRM software, people thought he was insane and were convinced software-as-a-service would never work. Although we are now living in a SaaS heaven with all of the benefits of software that is always available and up-to-date, we are also beginning to see the SaaS hell naysayers were warning us about.</p> <p>When selling Salesforce to a mid to large organization, Salesforce expects multi-year contracts with pre-negotiated user counts, exactly like the on-premise predecessors it ridiculed during its early days. The whole idea of “pay for what you use” has been subsumed by the realities of the sweet cash flow dynamics of a traditional enterprise sale, which ends up as shelfware when customers over-provision.</p> <p>Compounding this issue is that the expense is accounted as an operating expense that affects EBITDA, a key Wall Street metric, while on-premise software was accounted as a much more palatable capital expense.</p> <p>There are some other cracks in the SaaS armor. In a world of “big data,” enterprises are starting to realize that SaaS solutions do not offer unfettered access to their own data. Salesforce’s API access to your own data is metered and hinged off of user counts or API purchases – an enterprise has to take out its wallet and pay these vendors for scaled access to its own data. In a world of extreme security consciousness among CIOs, security is fully delegated to the SaaS provider. The multi-tenant model shares data infrastructure to the benefit of the vendor, not the customer. Integrating various SaaS silos has become so complicated that the field now has dedicated systems integrators like Appirio.</p> <p>SaaS has become the orthodoxy du jour, with an ecosystem ranging from accelerators to post-traction venture funds focused solidly on SaaS. After 15 years of SaaS, you do have to ask, what&#8217;s left to SaaS-ify? In many segments, we are now on the third or fourth iteration of software that offers essentially the same workflow, such as Namely and Betterworks on the heels of Workday. The latest entrants are forced to target verticals in sluggish industries like construction and energy. So the question is, what’s next?</p> <h3>Containers and Containers-as-a-Service</h3> <p>There has definitely been <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/15/heres-how-big-docker-got-last-year/">a lot of buzz</a> about Docker containers. The ability to separate an application, microservices, and their configuration from the underlying Linux operating system is very attractive. Orchestration layers built on top of containers such as Docker Swarm and Google’s Kubernetes make it easier to manage and scale clusters of containers.</p> <p>The three major cloud providers, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, have all added CaaS (Containers-as-a-Service), allowing any Docker container to run on their platform, filling a void between IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) that requires a lot more system administration and configuration, and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) that is typically very limiting in terms of language support and libraries.</p> <p>Containers have been around for quite a while. As Bill Coleman, the former head of Sun Micrososytems’ Software group, recently reminded me, Solaris offered containers in 2005. What’s changed is that the new generation of Docker-powered containers have widespread support and are easy to learn. Now that there is a standard way to manage and deploy applications, there is the potential to reinvent how cloud software is delivered.</p> <h3>The Potential for CaaSi to Fix SaaS</h3> <p>Imagine a world where when you can purchase software or rent an application, then run it in the public or private cloud of your choice. Just like SaaS, the software would be automatically maintained by the vendor. But you would own and control all of your data, including the access by the vendor.</p> <p>Until recently, this would have seemed like a pipe dream due to the intricacies of hosting, managing, and updating the software. Now, we are almost there. With some small incremental improvements, CaaS can evolve into CaaSi – Containers-as-a-Service for ISVs (Independent Software Vendors). Whether in a public cloud or in your own private cloud, the vendor would have the access and keys to manage and update the containers on your schedule rather than theirs. The vendor would not, however, have the ability to access your data without your explicit permission.</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-505ECSW_w0c/VU5tkHhZltI/AAAAAAAAA1Q/oJMHrGkYTu0/s1600/comparison1.jpg" /></center> <p>With the new CaaSi model, software customers have the best of the on-premise world combined with the best of the SaaS world. When customers buy software, just like with on-premise software, they have complete visibility into the hosting costs, full ownership of their data, tightly controlled security, and also the flexibility to use capital expense accounting. Just like with SaaS, they have the ability to scale as needed and receive automatic updates from the vendor.</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MZB-hX2AB4U/VU5tmXWeQwI/AAAAAAAAA1Y/jR6eWz58Efc/s1600/SaaS_CaaSi-comparison.jpg" /></center> <p>Given such a huge transition on the horizon, it is no wonder that Docker is a newly minted <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/docker-raises-95m-series-d-round-for-its-container-platform/">billion-dollar unicorn</a> with companies like <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/06/coreos-raises-12m-funding-round-led-by-google-ventures-to-bring-kubernetes-to-the-enterprise/">CoreOS</a> and <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/22/mesosphere-brings-support-for-googles-kubernetes-to-its-operating-system-for-the-data-center/">Mesosphere</a> battling over the best implementation of Google’s Kubernetes. In order to build out a CaaS/i future, CaaS providers need to add better support for immutable infrastructure by maintaining the separation between application containers and their underlying data, along with the delegated management of containers, usage metering for billing and abstraction for services such as logging and monitoring.</p> <p>One highly material benefit that customers receive from SaaS is the network effect – the ability of the vendor to analyze in aggregate how all of the users are using the system and accelerate that usage in new features. In order to provide a similar level of functionality in a CaaS/i world, customers would need to opt-in to anonymous collection of their data usage in order to receive the same benefits of the analysis. But rather than a drawback, perhaps this is the point: the vendor should have to ask permission in the first place, and the customer should control their sensitive data.</p> <p>A few startups are kicking off this trend. My own company, <a href="http://sapho.com/">Sapho</a>, is enthralled about the ship-as-a-container option and has launched that alternative. <a href="http://tray.io/">Tray.io</a>, an orchestration backend, is <em>only</em> available as Docker containers. And <a href="http://www.replicated.com/">Replicated</a> and <a href="http://www.infradash.com" target="_blank">Infradash</a> are providing the infrastructure for an independent software vendor to ship and manage Docker containers. The coming year should see a lot of activity on this front.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2015/05/goodbye-saas-hello-containers-as-service.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-8414245359490607197Fri, 13 Feb 2015 22:46:00 +00002015-05-09T14:55:39.208-07:00Small Screens, Big Decisions: How Mobile is Forcing Businesses to Rethink Software<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/13/small-screens-big-decisions-how-mobile-is-forcing-businesses-to-rethink-software/"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/TAil87OOncI/AAAAAAAAAPs/3kdYjex8A_E/s400/venture+beat+logo.png" border=0><br />This post was also published in VentureBeat.</a> <p/><center><img border="0" width="600" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6IwKDc_bsf4/VUvdVRxJurI/AAAAAAAAA04/rBFiaxLBOMM/s1600/mobile-business-apps.jpg" /></center> <p>One of the biggest problems in software is feature bloat. Even sprightly new companies that base their competitive strategy on minimalism and ease of use can eventually fall prey to the same force that bogged down their predecessors.</p> <p>For example, one could argue that thanks to feature bloat, Salesforce is more complicated today than Siebel was when Salesforce first promised a simple, cloud-based solution. The promise of simplicity must quickly meet the business reality of closing deals or improving productivity — and for many software vendors, the promise of simplicity gets lost as they add customers, all of whom have feature requests.</p> <p>Feature bloat happens because as software vendors add diverse customers, they end up adding features that are rarely used or only applicable to fringe use cases — many of the same ones that plague their incumbent competitors — ultimately slowing down the software and adding unnecessary complexity.</p> <p>A new vendor that adds 10 features for each thousand customers ends up with quite a bit of bloat. It’s very common for enterprise software vendors to add “appeasement features” (those features added to make a sale or appease a customer) even if it’s known that a sizeable chunk of the user base will ignore it. One classic <a href="http://xkcd.com/773/">XKCD comic about a university’s home page</a> mocks how rare it is that a home page shows the items users actually need. Recall the last time you used a copy machine; did you use any of the hundreds of options, or did you simply hit the big “Copy” button?</p> <p>The trouble is that feature bloat isn’t just a traditional software problem anymore. As workers mobilize and take business software with them on their devices, feature bloat can follow, resulting in heavy and cumbersome mobile apps. For instance, Workday’s mobile app <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/the-consumer-revolution-of-enterprise-computing/">piles on hundreds of new features</a>, very few of which users actually requested. Software bloat is particularly noticeable and problematic on mobile devices because they’re small and their screens can only fit so much, in spite of the recent trend of phablets and larger phones. Show too little, squeeze too much, or make it difficult to navigate, and the app becomes virtually unusable and engagement plummets. We’re often left thinking: Where’s the big “Copy” button?</p> <p>Knowing that space is limited and users increasingly demand a superior mobile experience, app developers have to put a great deal of thought into what to show and how users will interact with it. Consumer apps, for example, are unbundling themselves into easy-to-use single purpose apps ranging from Instagram to SnapChat to Tinder — all of which are able to maintain incredibly high user engagement.</p> <p>Thus, small screens present a beautiful challenge: As businesses develop mobile apps, they have a unique opportunity to prioritize what is shown on a device screen and determine what is actually usable and actionable for users. At last, a forcing function to limit the feature bloat of enterprise software, at least on mobile devices.</p> <h3><b>Too Much Information, Too Little Space</b></h3> <p>Recently, one of our customers at <a href="http://sapho.com">Sapho</a> complained that one of their mobile business apps was taking a long time to load. Upon investigation, we discovered that they had replicated a desktop web experience on mobile. Their 16-column Excel-style table with hundreds of rows was being shoe-horned into a “mobile-friendly” app. “Mobile-friendly” it was not; the sheer volume of data displayed made it completely unworkable, from the loading process to viewing and editing.</p> <p>This customer is not alone; plenty of enterprises create mobile apps with the intention of replicating the desktop experience on mobile. The result is the opposite of their ultimate goal — to enable users to be more productive away from their desktops — because the unwieldy app becomes difficult to access and interact with.</p> <h3>Choose Your Most Important Data</h3> <p>The first big decision for an enterprise mobile app is to choose which data to bring to the mobile experience and then accept the fact that the rest is best left behind on desktop. Not all data is valued in the same way, and mobile presents distinct use cases. Did the Sapho customer need all 16 columns of data on its mobile app, or could it have selected the six that its users truly wanted on the go?</p> <p>Consumer services have been faster to catch on to this. The website of a weather service might display a wealth of information: granular data on sun and moon cycles; the exact time of today’s civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight; and historic average rainfall for each month of the year. The same company’s mobile app would narrow its focus, showing the user a smaller and more mobile-relevant subset of information about weather conditions at the current location for the current week.</p> <h3>Rethink Workflow</h3> <p>The second big decision is to rethink the user’s workflows as they interact with data, redesigning the basic architecture of the information itself for a fundamentally mobile experience. If desktop software is a meal, we need to course it out and cut it up into manageable bites if it’s expected to be consumed on mobile. In the case of our Sapho customer, we moved the data into selection lists that let users delve deeper as needed — as opposed to showing one big spreadsheet — resulting in dramatically decreased load times and enabling users to navigate and engage with the data quickly and easily. Think about which areas of the software are used most, from the data itself to the editing tools, action buttons, text fields, banners, and more, and ensure that the most-used areas are front and center while less-used areas remain hidden.</p> <h3>Build in Notifications</h3> <p>The third big decision is how to incorporate notifications for the enterprise mobile app. The best way to remove features from an app is to make it intelligent and predictive. The current enterprise software paradigm forces users to remember what they need from an app and then perform an action. It’s the only paradigm we’ve ever known. But just as iTunes and Amazon make recommendations based on your previous spending behavior, enterprise software must learn about its users and deliver relevant information to them. Users on mobile increasingly expect software to process on their behalf and notify them of important events, and the next generation of enterprise apps should offer notifications that let users know when something important happens in their business.</p> <p>The thoughtful prioritization of data and its organization into new workflows with notifications create the foundation for a rich and powerful mobile experience, offering businesses the opportunity to finally harness enterprise software for an entire organization. IT organizations and vendors have the opportunity to renew a conversation about how to make the big decisions that make sense for their company; the big decision that will finally make small screens valuable across the organization.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2015/02/small-screens-big-decisions-how-mobile.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-168776298776770666Sun, 09 Nov 2014 07:43:00 +00002014-11-08T23:43:56.639-08:00The Rise and Fall of the Full Stack Developer<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-full-stack-developer/"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XXLY9GBg-c0/Uf1qN8XnkqI/AAAAAAAAAog/1WLOrSNyR_c/s1600/tc-techcrunch.png" /></a><br /><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-full-stack-developer/">This post was also published on TechCrunch.</a><p/> <center><img border="0" width="600" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ekzDxyz-pOQ/VF8agCzW8kI/AAAAAAAAAz8/Cek8b1xDSBs/s1600/stacks.jpg" /></center> <p>It seems as though everyone in tech today is infatuated with the full-stack developer. Full stack may have been possible in the Web 2.0 era, but a new generation of startups is emerging, pushing the limits of virtually all areas of software. From machine intelligence to predictive push computing to data analytics to mobile/wearable and more, it’s becoming virtually impossible for a single developer to program across the modern full stack.</p> <p>When I first started programming computers as a kid in the pre-mobile, pre-web late 1970s/early 1980s, a single person typically wrote a complete software program from start to finish, and there weren’t many other layers of software between the programmer and the hardware. Using assembly language was the norm for programmers trying to squeeze more performance and space out of machines with 8-bit processors and very limited memory.</p> <p>Programming applications quickly evolved into a team sport with the advent of client/server computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the wave of Internet computing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Each facet of new technology was so complex that a specialist was often required, sometimes one for different tiers (e.g. front-ends, databases, application servers, etc.) Managing a business website became a specialty that included operating networking equipment, such as routers and load balancers, tweaking Java virtual machines, and using various database indexing mechanisms.</p> <p>By the mid-2000s, creating virtually anything — from simple websites to next-generation SaaS services — became prohibitively expensive. The rising expense was directly correlated to the overhead of numerous individuals from the various tiers communicating (and often miscommunicating) with each other, and changes in one tier cascading into other tiers and into deployment parameters. As Marc Andreessen pointed out in a recent tweet storm about burn rates, “More people multiplies communication overhead exponentially, slows everything down.”</p> <p>Conversely, the technology to create the new generation of Web 2.0 sites became increasingly streamlined and simplified. Programmers switched from using the more complicated enterprise Java stack and databases such as Oracle to the more straightforward LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl). New languages and frameworks such as Django and Ruby on Rails automated the layer between the website and the database. Front-end frameworks such as jQuery helped abstract all of the intricacies between different browsers. Cloud services such as Amazon Web Services simplified deployment and provided turnkey networking.</p> <p>By the late 2000s, it became possible for many programmers to deliver a complete consumer or SaaS site, including a dynamic web client, server-side business logic, a scalable database, deployment, and operational support. This new breed of full-stack developer could run circles around teams of programmers attempting the same task. When projects scaled up, adding more full-stack programmers allowed a single person to add a single feature across all the tiers of an application, which accelerated feature delivery over the communication overhead of having different people own the feature in each tier.</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TTjzJd91AA4/VF8agGg2P7I/AAAAAAAAA0A/W75qKO-MfZE/s1600/image2.png" /></center> <p>If you’re building a website on the full stack illustrated above, find full-stack developers who can effectively wear these hats. But these days — and call me crazy — I’d consider this a less-than-full-stack. Here’s a fuller full stack:</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AqxP3QKLhvY/VF8agDn63iI/AAAAAAAAAz4/3jIp7RpX7_0/s1600/image-1.png" /></center> <p>I’d wager that there are zero individuals with advanced-level knowledge in each of these areas that would be capable of single-handedly delivering this next generation kind of application. Just keeping up with the advancements and new programming interfaces in each category is almost a full-time job.</p> <p>We are in the midst of a rapid shift to more complicated technologies that, as in days gone by, require experts at each tier. Developing excellent iOS and Android applications requires experts in those platforms that understand the intricacies. Operationally, tending to new object databases such as Mongo requires constant attention and tweaking. Running an application on cloud services such as Amazon requires knowing the ins-and-outs of its various services and expertise on how to failover across regions. Even the venerable web front-end has evolved into CSS4, JSON and JavaScript MVC frameworks, such as Angular.js and Backbone.js.</p> <p>In this brave new world, it is critical to have at least one person with at least a functional understanding of each of the composite parts who is also capable of connecting various tiers and working with each expert so that a feature can actually be delivered. In a way, these tier-connecting, bridge-building software architects — who are likely experts in only one or a couple of tiers — are less full stack developer and much more full stack integrator.</p><p>Rest in peace, full stack developers. Welcome, full stack integrators, in addition to engineers with deep technical skills in particular areas. It’s a fascinating world of software out there and we need you more than ever.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-full-stack.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-6157506979356228623Sat, 23 Aug 2014 21:00:00 +00002014-09-13T00:40:28.573-07:00Why Are PC Sales Up And Tablet Sales Down?<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/23/why-are-pcs-up-and-tablets-down/"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XXLY9GBg-c0/Uf1qN8XnkqI/AAAAAAAAAog/1WLOrSNyR_c/s1600/tc-techcrunch.png" /></a><br /><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/23/why-are-pcs-up-and-tablets-down/">This post was also published on TechCrunch.</a><p/><center><img border="0" width="600" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JCRED_rXI48/VBP0rWxVj-I/AAAAAAAAAzo/_Ln5VsFeHcA/s1600/shutterstock_140403064-e1408730767698.jpg" /></center><p>When iPads first came out, they were hailed as the undoing of the PC. Finally, a cheap and reliable computing device for the average user instead of the complicated, quirky PC. After a few years of strong growth for iOS and Android tablets and a corresponding decrease in PC sales, the inverse is suddenly true: PC sales are up and <a target="_blank" href="http://recode.net/2014/07/30/exclusive-interview-best-buy-ceo-says-tablet-sales-are-crashing-sees-hope-for-pcs/">tablet sales are “crashing.”</a> What happened?</p><p>The tablet slowdown shouldn’t be a surprise given that tablets have hardly improved beyond relatively superficial changes in size, screen resolution, and processor speed. The initial market for tablets is now saturated: grandparents and kids have them, people bought them as Sonos controllers and such, and numerous households have them around for reading. People that want tablets have them, and there’s just no need to upgrade because they more than adequately perform their assigned tasks.</p><p>Businesses and consumers alike are <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/11/the-pc-market-has-its-strongest-quarter-in-recent-memory/">again purchasing PCs</a>, and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247860/Apple_defies_PC_downturn_again_boosts_Mac_sales">Mac sales are on the rise</a> year-over-year. Businesses in particular are forced to upgrade older PCs now that Windows XP is <a target="_blank" href="http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-support-help">no longer supported</a>. When purchasing a new PC, the main driver to choose a PC versus a tablet is fairly obvious: If you are creating any type of content regularly, you need a keyboard, a larger screen, and (for most businesses) Microsoft Office.</p><h3>Reigniting Tablet Growth with “Super Tablets”</h3><p>For the tablet category to continue to grow, tablets need to move beyond what Chris Dixon calls the “<a target="_blank" href="http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy/">toy phase</a>” and become more like PCs. The features required for a tablet to evolve into a super tablet are straight from the PC playbook: at least a 13” screen, 64 bit processor, 2GB of RAM, 256GB drive, a real keyboard, an actual file system, and an improved operating system with windowing and true multitasking capability. Super tablets form factors could range from notebooks to all-in-one desktops like the iMac. Small 7” and 9” super tablets could dock into larger screens and keyboards.</p><p>The computer industry is littered with the detritus of failed attempts to simplify PCs ranging from Sun Micrososytems’ Sun Ray to Oracle’s Network Computer to Microsoft’s Windows CE. But this time, it’s actually different. The power of mass-produced, 64-bit ARM chips, economies of scale from smartphone and tablet production, and — most importantly — the vast ecosystem of iOS and Android apps have finally made such a “network computer” feasible.</p><h3>Businesses Need Super Tablets</h3><p>As the former CIO at CBS Interactive, I would have bought such super tablets in droves for our employees, the vast majority of whom primarily use only a web browser and Microsoft Office. There will of course always be power users such as developers and video editors that require a full-fledged PC. A souped-up tablet would indeed garner corporate sales, as Tim Cook would like for the iPad … but only at the expense of MacBooks.</p><p>The cost of managing PCs in an enterprise are enormous, with Gartner estimating that the total cost of ownership for a notebook computer can be as <a target="_blank" href="http://www.techrepublic.com/resource-library/whitepapers/gartner-whitepaper-notebook-total-cost-of-ownership-2013-update/post/">high as $9,000</a>. PCs are expensive, prone to failure, easy to break and magnets for viruses and malware. After just a bit of use, many PCs are susceptible to constant freezes and crashes.</p><p>PCs are so prone to failure that ServiceNow — a company devoted to helping IT organizations track help desk tickets — is worth over $8 billion. Some organizations are so fed up with problematic PCs that they are using expensive and cumbersome desktop virtualization, where the PC environment is strongly controlled on servers and streamed to a client.</p><p>And while Macs are somewhat better than Windows, I suggest you stand next to any corporate help desk or the Apple genius bar and watch and learn if you think they are not problematic.</p><p>The main benefits of super tablets to enterprises are their systems management and replaceability. Smartphones and tablets are so simple and easy to manage that they are typically handled by an IT organization’s cost-effective phone team rather than more expensive PC technicians, who are typically so overwhelmed with small problems that they cannot focus on fixing more complex issues. Apps can be provisioned and updated by both IT and end-users without causing conflicts or problems. If a device is lost, it is easy to remote wipe data and to provision a new device with all of the same settings.</p><p>Programs like BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) just accentuate the fact that smartphones and tablets are so easy to manage that enterprises are comfortable letting their employees pick the devices themselves. Users also get great benefits, including instant-on, long battery life, simplicity, and access to legions of apps from the iTunes and Play app stores.</p><h3>Why Can’t the Big 3 Deliver a Super Tablet?</h3><p>Former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée has long pointed out that Apple is gradually <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/02/19/apple%E2%80%99s-grand-user-experience-unification/">converging Mac OS X and iOS</a> and will likely replace <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/08/03/macintel-the-end-is-nigh/">Intel processors with ARM processors</a>. However, Apple is steadfast in maintaining a separation between the tablets and PCs and is bridging the divide with its new Continuity features. While Microsoft is willing to hack a touch interface onto a desktop experience, Apple will understandably not go there until the experience is perfect.</p><p>Apple will have to make this switch at some point soon, however, as users are increasingly expecting <a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38">every screen to be touch-enabled</a>. Tim Cook claims that he is not afraid of <a target="_blank" href="http://allthingsd.com/20130123/apple-ceo-dont-fear-cannibalization-embrace-it/">cannibalizing businesses,</a> but Apple seems reticent to cannibalize its growing $20 billion Mac business.</p><p>Google’s Chromebook is essentially a PC that can only run web apps. As many commentators have puzzled, Google should be focusing on a desktop version of Android rather than Chrome OS. The market has decided that it wants native apps on smartphones and tablets, so clearly users are going to want native apps on their PC replacements, as well.</p><p>Android has a huge advantage with its large app store and developer community. The Chrome OS has an inherently flawed mission – why try to compete with Windows whilst Microsoft itself is moving beyond Windows? The <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/11/acers-tegra-k1-powered-chromebook-boasts-up-to-13-hours-of-battery-life/">new generation of ChromeBooks</a> based on ARM chips closely matches the specs of a super tablet – there just aren’t any apps because of the Chrome OS constraint. The hardware is right, but the operating system is wrong.</p><p>Microsoft is actually very well positioned for a super tablet world with its Office 365 for iPad and Android, since as a subscription product it can draw revenue long after a manufacturer cashes in the thin margins on the hardware itself. This is an opportunity for Microsoft to make more money on a Mac than Apple does, as Microsoft did in the 1990s. Microsoft has already written off <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/30/the-resurgent-post-windows-microsoft/">making money on Windows</a> on low-end hardware and is setting itself up for a <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/10/satya-nadellas-vision-for-a-new-microsoft/">post-Windows future</a> around devices and services under Satya Nadella’s leadership.</p><p>Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 is a somewhat valiant attempt to reinvent the PC as a super tablet; however it is expensive and has a small screen, a subpar keyboard, a power hungry Intel processor and all of the headaches of managing Windows. The much-panned Surface 2 with Windows RT is ironically a step in the right direction, but its 32-bit ARM processor is underpowered and there aren’t many apps in the Windows Store. Microsoft coincidentally offered Windows CE devices in the late 1990s that were actually quite close to super tablets, but like with Windows touch tablet, they entered the market far too early.</p><p>The ecosystem around building, distributing and maintaining PCs is massive and Apple, and the PC companies are understandably reluctant to cannibalize their sales. Lenovo offers a<a target="_blank" href="http://www.zdnet.com/lenovo-confirms-ideapad-a10-android-laptop-after-leaking-manual-online-7000021872/"> 10″ Android notebook</a> and HP is reportedly <a target="_blank" href="http://www.zdnet.com/hp-slatebook-14-android-touchscreen-laptop-revealed-in-hp-video-7000028833/">soon shipping one</a>, but these are intentionally small and underpowered in order to not compete with notebooks. This vacuum presents an opportunity for companies like Sony that have exited the PC business but continue to sell smartphones and tablets.</p><p>Samsung in particular is <a target="_blank" href="http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/06/25/samsung-reportedly-shutting-down-desktop-pc-business-amid-declining-demand/">reportedly looking to shutdown its PC business</a>, and must be evaluating how to grow its tablet business now that its smartphone sales have slowed. Samsung could offer up Office 365 bundling in exchange for royalty-free device sales in its next patent conflict with Microsoft.</p><h3>The Enterprise Legacy Web Holdup</h3><p>An interesting side note is that large enterprises typically run numerous legacy web applications that do not work on modern web browsers, with some legacy web applications only working on ancient browsers like Internet Explorer 6. Many of these applications were built in the first wave of the Internet to enable “employee self-service” and have not been touched since that era. Perhaps the move to a simpler, cheaper PC replacement will finally shift the cost/benefit equation such that these web applications will finally be upgraded or replaced with SaaS solutions.</p><p>Here’s hoping that the Apple, Google and Microsoft can soon move into a super-tablet future where most businesses and consumers will be able to manage and customize their PCs as easily as they manage their phones and tablets … and us techies can move on from our part-time tech support jobs.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2014/08/why-are-pc-sales-up-and-tablet-sales.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-5488192253584303938Sun, 27 Jul 2014 06:24:00 +00002014-07-29T23:25:15.299-07:00BMW Vs. Tesla: A Real Live Innovator’s Dilemma<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/26/bmw-vs-tesla-is-a-real-live-innovators-dilemma-battle/"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XXLY9GBg-c0/Uf1qN8XnkqI/AAAAAAAAAog/1WLOrSNyR_c/s1600/tc-techcrunch.png" /></a><br /><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/26/bmw-vs-tesla-is-a-real-live-innovators-dilemma-battle/">This post was also published on TechCrunch.</a><p/><center><img border="0" width="600" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6wpHn68YSTw/U9iPlAGLpgI/AAAAAAAAAzY/mtQRFdXxsoU/s1600/bmw-tesla3.jpg" /></center><p>Jill Lepore genereated quite a fracas in Silicon Valley with her <a target="_blank" href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/23/140623fa_fact_lepore">New Yorker article</a> that questions disruptive innovation and posits that large incumbent companies often survive and subsume disruptive technology with small incremental gains. Fortunately, we have a live Petri dish: <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/i/i3/2013/showroom/">BMW’s new electric i3</a> is an ongoing case study of a legacy manufacturer facing an innovator’s dilemma in the face of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.teslamotors.com/">Tesla</a>, a very aggressive new competitor with next-generation technology.</p><p>Elon Musk has defined the standard for a future mass-produced electric car – it <a target="_blank" href="http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/tesla/87867/tesla-model-iii-to-challenge-bmw-3-series-world-exclusive">must cost around $40,000, have a range of 200 miles, and be comparable to a BMW 3 series</a>. In order to achieve that audacious goal, Tesla is embarking on a plan to build a “Gigafactory” capable of producing batteries at an efficient and lower cost that would make such a dream car feasible. Investors are betting that Tesla will be able to dominate the electric car market when it achieves scale, continuing a growth rate that values Tesla at $28 billion even though it only <a target="_blank" href="http://insideevs.com/tesla-reports-q1-2014-earnings/">produces 35,000 vehicles a year</a>. It is interesting that Musk directly compared the Tesla’s upcoming mass market Model 3 directly to the BMW 3 series, given that BMW is now delivering its new i3 to the US market in accessible volumes.</p><p>There are lots of great lessons for entrepreneurs to learn from watching the BMW versus Tesla battle since cars are so tangible and manufacturer sales tactics are so transparent.</p><h3><strong>Brand</strong></h3><p>Even though it has a “3” in its name, the i3 is decidedly not a 3 series BMW. It is two feet shorter, and should instead be in the BMW 1 series product family. The i3’s electric range of 80-100 miles makes it more similar to electric cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt and nowhere close to a technological wonder like the Tesla Model S.</p><p>Despite its limitations, the i3 is clearly resonating, with rave reviews and a price that is <a target="_blank" href="http://www.truecar.com/prices-new/bmw/i3-pricing/2014/147E1B30/?trimOptionIds=0-C-U,6-C-U,17-C-U,7-C-U,11-C-U&amp;exteriorColorId=1014936&amp;interiorColorId=1014928&amp;incentiveIds=&amp;trimId=265971&amp;zipcode=94123">spiking over the last month on TrueCar</a>, indicating high initial demand in the United States. BMW has (mis)used the power of the 3 series brand to its benefit, and can now add features like longer length and range incrementally as battery technology improves.</p><p><em>Lesson: Legacy companies can mislabel their products to leverage their brand, especially if an upstart compares itself directly to a particular model.</em></p><table border="1"><tbody><tr><td width="156"></td><td width="156"><b>Tesla Model 3 (Estimated)</b></td><td width="156"><b>BMW i3</b></td><td width="156"><b>BMW 320</b></td></tr><tr><td width="156"><b>Passengers</b></td><td width="156">5</td><td width="156">5</td><td width="156">5</td></tr><tr><td width="156"><b>Range</b></td><td width="156">~200 miles on electric</td><td width="156">80-100 miles on electric, 185 miles with gas range extender(Total hack!)</td><td width="156">380-576 miles on gas</td></tr><tr><td width="156"><b>Base Price</b></td><td width="156">~$40,000</td><td width="156">$41,350</td><td width="156">$32,750</td></tr><tr><td width="156"><b>0-60</b></td><td width="156">N/A</td><td width="156">7.2 seconds</td><td width="156">7.1 seconds</td></tr><tr><td width="156"><b>Dimensions</b></td><td width="156">~182” long x ~71” wide (Matching BMW 3 series)</td><td width="156">157” long x 70” wide (Not even close to a 3 series!)</td><td width="156">182” long x 71” wide</td></tr><tr><td width="156"><b>Availability</b></td><td width="156">2017</td><td width="156">2014</td><td width="156">2014</td></tr></tbody></table><p/><h3><strong>Technology</strong></h3><p>BMW invested tremendous resources in its electric car platform to develop an all-electric vehicle platform, and it is willing to integrate legacy technology in order to deliver immediate value to its customers. Conversely, Mercedes chose a partnership route and is <a target="_blank" href="http://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-powered-mercedes-b-class-is-coming-to-the-u-s-1569161110">buying the drivetrain and battery technology for its upcoming electric car from Tesla</a>. Both BMW and Mercedes are well ahead of Tesla in advanced vehicle technology like self-parking and cruise control that can automatically follow highway lanes and maintain distance from other vehicles.</p><p>Rather than waiting for battery technology to evolve to make an all-electric car with a 200-mile range at a mid-range price point, BMW is selling an optional “range extender” consisting of a two cylinder motorcycle engine that maintains the batteries at a 5 percent power level and extends the car’s range an additional 80 miles. Since the range extender powers the batteries rather than a gas engine, the i3 is not a hybrid, but the range extender can be continually refilled so that the car is never stuck without power. It’s a total hack, but is well thought out and competitive. BMW’s engineers must have been giggling when they came up with this one.</p><p>With the i3, BMW has delivered a “good enough” luxury electric car for the urban driver and average commuter, who can also optionally use the car for longer trips without having to plan for supercharger stations.</p><p><em>Lesson: Legacy companies are often willing to hodgepodge new technology with their older technology to stave off new competitors.</em></p><h3><strong>Volume </strong></h3><p>Tesla shipped its first car in 2006 and is expecting sell <a target="_blank" href="http://insideevs.com/tesla-reports-q1-2014-earnings/">35,000 Model S sedans in 2014</a>, or roughly 17,500 units in the second half of 2014. BMW started selling i3’s in 2014 and sold 6,000 i3’s in the first half of the year, primarily in the European market, which now has 3 to 6 months waits for the car. Now that demand is spiking, BMW <a target="_blank" href="http://www.torquenews.com/2250/bmw-i3-increases-production-meet-high-demand-will-double-2014-projections">increased production to 20,000 units annually and is now producing 100 units a day, a run rate of over 30,000 units annually</a>. The fact that a legacy manufacturer is on the verge of outselling Tesla in its own luxury electric segment in the first year of shipping is fascinating given Tesla’s superior product and years of market lead.</p><p><em>Lesson: Once legacy companies have hodgepodged technology, they can produce it at scale.</em></p><h3><strong>Sales</strong></h3><p>While Tesla is right in attempting to disrupt the antiquated dealership business model, BMW will be able to leverage its extensive dealer network to deliver to consumers worldwide, and consumers can use web services like <a target="_blank" href="http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/truecar">TrueCar</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/beepi">Beepi</a> to bypass the hassle of negotiating with dealers on the price of a new car and trade-in amount. BMW also has access to a deep well of financial incentives to drive consumers to buy cars. Auto manufacturers and their dealers are fighting Tesla with regulatory measures to slow the company down and limit market penetration.</p><p><em>Lesson: Innovators should not underestimate the power of a legacy company’s large, lumbering sales channel.</em></p><h3><strong>Market Entry</strong></h3><p>Tesla had to enter the market at the high-end in order to deliver batteries capable of long ranges at a margin that would deliver profits to fickle investors, years before it could deliver a mass market mid-range vehicle. BMW’s breadth enables it to enter at the mid-market and then move up into the ultra high-end next year in the U.S. with its <a target="_blank" href="http://www.digitalspy.com/tech/feature/a584081/bmw-i8-review-this-is-what-the-future-of-cars-will-look-like.html">i8 supercar</a>. To BMW, the distinctive, urban-friendly i3 is essentially a rolling advertisement for BMW’s innovative and green future, so the company could even sell them at a loss and come out ahead.</p><p>Tesla’s high-end first approach could turn into a liability as the Tesla S is quite large and therefore not well suited for urban environments – it is wider than and almost as long as a 7 series BMW. Large, luxury four door sedans are typically purchased by upper middle class men over the age of 35 which, as a member of the demographic, I unfortunately have to admit we’re not exactly the most hip crowd. BMW examined the market thoroughly and is targeting hip, young, urban professionals with the i3’s forward design, a smaller urban-friendly size, and the brand’s proven appeal with a younger demographic.</p><p><em>Lesson: Legacy companies are often in numerous segments of a market and leverage their scale to beat an upstart’s roadmap.</em></p><h3><strong>Who Exactly Is Getting Disrupted?</strong></h3><p>The big question is what industry exactly are electric cars are disrupting? At first it seemed like the legacy auto manufacturers would not be able to step up to an electric car challenge. They have widely adopted hybrid electric cars, are now delivering somewhat competitive electric cars, and are continually experimenting with <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/09/fuel-cell-cars-are-going-to-get-a-big-boost-in-california-next-year/">hydrogen fuel cells</a>. From a broader view, it is possible that ExxonMobil and Chevron will be more disrupted by electric vehicles rather than BMW and Chevrolet.</p><p>Elon Musk is an entrepreneurial hero who is concurrently disrupting the passenger vehicle, space transportation and electric utility industries. Some of the legacy companies in those industries were bound to wake up at some point and respond aggressively. Fortunately, Musk can rest assured that the United Launch Alliance will not be as agile against SpaceX as BMW has been against Tesla!</p><p><em>Disclosure: The author is number 6,250 on the Tesla Model X waitlist.</em></p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2014/07/bmw-vs-tesla-real-live-innovators.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-5560111570930252616Sat, 14 Jun 2014 16:00:00 +00002014-06-15T19:33:23.162-07:00Google's Push Past Search<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/14/googles-push-past-search/"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XXLY9GBg-c0/Uf1qN8XnkqI/AAAAAAAAAog/1WLOrSNyR_c/s1600/tc-techcrunch.png" /></a><br /><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/14/googles-push-past-search/">This post was also published on TechCrunch.</a><p/> <p>As a recent analysis indicated, Google&#8217;s traditional search is <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/06/we-search-more-on-apps-less-on-google-now/">not working on mobile</a> as well as it did on the desktop web. Sifting through organic search results on a mobile device is a sub-optimal experience, especially when compared to the push notifications and personalized streams of cards that have made mobile apps from Facebook, Twitter and Tinder so habit-forming and successful.</p><p>Google is getting well ahead of its mobile organic search problem, especially on Android where it has full control of the end-to-end mobile experience. Google has strung together push notifications, a stream of predictive answers and an answer box in an attempt to answer a search query <em>three times</em> before showing organic search results.</p> <p><strong> </strong><strong>Answer Attempt </strong>No. 1 &#8211; Notify you that something important is happening before you even ask</p> <p>Google&#8217;s primary push play is its much-maligned Google Now, which is increasingly becoming more functional and relevant, especially for Android users. Google Now uses mobile notifications for important events. This feature has initially focused around calendar appointments and location, with more recent additions such as sports scores for teams you follow.</p> <p>When you have an upcoming calendar appointment, Google Now checks travel routes and notifies you when you should leave in order to arrive at the appointment on time. Google Now sometimes gets confused about where you are going and doesn&#8217;t know when you are going to work or skipping an appointment. However, when it works, the feature really feels like magic.</p> <center><img border="0" height="370" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-reY2ktldius/U55Whn6JQcI/AAAAAAAAAu8/_QyVyq6JVLw/s1600/Image+1.png" /></center> <p>As Google Now learns what you are interested in, this notification feature will likely incorporate big stock swings in your portfolio, major news events of interest to you and important emails from your boss. The calendar notifications themselves will likely be a lot smarter, with features like Refresh or RelateIQ that provide context around a meeting. Right now, Google Now is a lot like type-ahead: when it works, it&#8217;s great. When it doesn&#8217;t, it&#8217;s a real pain. But it is slowly getting better and more context-aware.</p> <p><strong> </strong><strong>Answer Attempt </strong>No. 2 &#8211; Show you things you might search for before you even search</p> <p>In an ideal situation, Google Now would anticipate what you want and deliver you a card before you even thought to ask. Perhaps Google will get there one day. In the meantime, Google wants its users to form habits around its Google Now cards as much as possible.</p><p>When you type a Google search on a mobile Android device, Google automatically pushes the Google Now stream, which attempts to predict what you might be searching for by showing a stream of updates to websites that you have recently visited, new content for search terms you have searched, real world events such as a new episode of a television show whose website you have visited, and nearby places in case you are looking for a café or a restaurant. Google uses your search history and profile information to build the cards, so the cards are generally very relevant.</p> <p>Google Now is becoming increasingly anticipatory about new search results you might find interesting by incorporating the Google knowledge graph into search. It can tie various web pages together based on distinct entities such as a band. When you search for a band and listen to its YouTube song, Google Now will tell you when they&#8217;re coming to town to play a show.</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sLFZwrGDrXQ/U55WhcE_pjI/AAAAAAAAAuo/WQgU66fd0I8/s1600/Image+2.png" /></center> <p>Yes, Google is not only crawling the entire web, it is now <em>crawling the entire web on your behalf</em> and flagging pages it thinks will be interesting to you. In addition, Google is even trying to figure out things like where you parked and if you are on public transport to notify you when it&#8217;s your stop.</p><p><strong> </strong><strong>Answer Attempt </strong>No. 3 &#8211; Answer your query with an answer box</p><p>If Google fails at answering what you want with a push notification or its predictive stream of cards, it still shows you a card above the search results. The Google &#8220;Answer Box&#8221; is where Google really shines, delivering cards that contain the answer to many common and even obscure queries. Google takes in context such as location and responds to voice and written queries with the answer to a question. The thing to realize is that most answer boxes will eventually become a Google Now card, delivering answers to questions before you even ask.</p> <center><p><em>I see no search results &#8211; looks just like Google Now!</em></p><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XwEKkNTywLs/U55WheR14iI/AAAAAAAAAuk/7Jua9WGfIRg/s1600/Image+3.png" /></center> <p>As users become increasingly accustomed to Google answer cards, they will be less and less surprised when these cards start to materialize before they have even entered a search query.</p> <p><strong> </strong><strong>Answer Attempt </strong>No. 4 &#8211; Show the search results that we once loved and now disdain on mobile</p> <p>Yes, Google&#8217;s organic search, which we have known and loved since the late nineties, is now a failure condition of a failure condition of a failure condition. Going through and clicking on search listings on a mobile device is just painful. Every time I get the search results, I wish Google had instead returned an answer box &#8211; why can&#8217;t the Google knowledge graph just show me the date of the event I&#8217;m looking for?</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bl-9fCzQBtg/U55Wh4vM2pI/AAAAAAAAAus/rx-zRh3D95Q/s1600/Image+4.png" /></center> <p>The shift away from showing organic search results on mobile devices will have a profound effect on websites that rely on Google for traffic, on top of the devastation wrought by the Google algorithm updates of the past few years.</p> <p><strong>Are these &#8220;cards&#8221; just a deconstructed portal? Yes in some ways, and that&#8217;s just great</strong></p> <p>Wait, haven&#8217;t we seen little boxes of relevant data before? Google Now in some ways is the new, smarter portal that figures out what you should know. Google Now doesn&#8217;t show your entire stock portfolio, it only shows the top movers in your portfolio. It is not a coincidence that Google launched Google Now for desktop Chrome soon after it killed its iGoogle portal. It is ironic that Yahoo, which essentially invented the portal category, is now trying to reinvigorate its search product, while Google is moving past search and what is effectively a next generation portal.</p> <p>Google is the stalwart of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 &#8220;Pull Computing,&#8221; with interaction hinged around a user deciding to search for something and sifting through results and advertising. Google is now reinventing itself on mobile with a &#8220;Push Computing&#8221; paradigm. Push Computing, where server computers curate and organize content to send to a client, is the backbone of successful mobile companies.</p> <p>There were attempts in the late 1990s to push-enable portals with products like PointCast, but they were cluttered with too much content to consume and required too much bandwidth for the time. Google is addressing those problems by curating what is sent to clients with extensive machine learning.</p> <p>The Google search experience was not going to carry Google into the future, and Google is getting well ahead of the problem by predictively pushing cards into notifications and a stream. And just like they did last time with search, they can figure out how to monetize later. Google Shopping&#8217;s answer box is entirely paid (<a target="_blank" href="http://recode.net/2014/02/15/heres-how-googles-new-search-results-will-look-under-european-antitrust-settlement/">although not in the EU due to antitrust issues</a>) and on a mobile screen there is plenty of room to add a single, very expensive AdWord ad to every answer box. As Google learned the first time around, there are a lot of ways to make money when you&#8217;re the on-ramp to everyone&#8217;s Internet.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2014/06/googles-push-past-search.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-5676311165993538701Mon, 31 Mar 2014 03:54:00 +00002014-03-30T20:54:50.623-07:00The Resurgent, Post-Windows Microsoft<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/30/the-resurgent-post-windows-microsoft/"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XXLY9GBg-c0/Uf1qN8XnkqI/AAAAAAAAAog/1WLOrSNyR_c/s1600/tc-techcrunch.png" /></a><br /><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/30/the-resurgent-post-windows-microsoft/">This post was also published on TechCrunch.</a><p/> <center><img border="0" width="680" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iihnPbXgsEE/Uzjmp5ylKbI/AAAAAAAAAuM/ub2w0E03Ke0/s1600/msftoneyared.png" /></center> <p>Microsoft had become an oft-ignored, behemoth to the North, despite $77 billion in revenue, $57 billion in gross profits and $21 billion in net income. It seemed that the mobile revolution had passed it by. Although Steve Ballmer was already making many of the right moves, it took new CEO Satya Nadella to fully accept that Microsoft had to move beyond Windows into a new future of apps and cloud services.</p><p>The future of Microsoft is in selling its software, such as Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP, and Microsoft servers in the Azure cloud to business customers on whatever platform they like. Each of these products is arguably best-of-breed and cloud-based, and has a large customer base. Microsoft indeed has the ability to pivot, and pivot hard, as it did when it switched from pushing MSN to competing with Netscape in the Internet space. And Microsoft is once again not encumbered by antitrust restrictions from aggressively pursuing these markets.</p><p>There was a time when, if Redmond aimed its guns at a market segment, startups fled. Since the launch of the iPhone almost seven years ago, Silicon Valley startups have operated without any fear of Microsoft competing aggressively in apps and device-agnostic cloud services.</p><p>As the first step towards its new OS-agnostic future, Microsoft recently released its OneNote note-management software for the Mac OS, rounding out a full multi-platform strategy for the software, including Windows, Windows Phone, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android and web.</p><p>Microsoft quickly followed up with <a target="_blank" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303779504579465533553281294">Office 365 for iPad</a>, in addition to its existing Android, iPhone and Mac support. Microsoft Office 365 is remarkably good, and offers a web only option that is priced the same as Google Drive with far better features and the familiarity of Office. Power users can pay more per month for small business premium that includes the desktop versions of the apps, so an IT department can offer different versions to different types of users. Office 365 now only has <a target="_blank" href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans-FX102918419.aspx">three different versions</a>, versus the headache-inducing menu from years past. Most business buy Microsoft software through enterprise license agreements which will bypass the Apple 30 percent cut.</p><p>Although it is a huge step for Microsoft Office to now be available on all of these platforms, just touch-enabling software does not necessarily make it mobile first. Microsoft has to keep a sharp eye on startups like Quip that have completely rethought the office experience for mobile.</p><p>Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP are a billion dollar plus business and growing rapidly. Dynamics CRM is available as SaaS on all platforms including iOS and Android. Dynamics ERP is available as a cloud hosted solution but is not yet available on other client platforms.</p><p>Windows Azure cloud, which is rumored to be <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/microsoft-reportedly-will-rebrand-windows-azure-to-microsoft-azure/">rebranded to &#8220;Microsoft Azure,&#8221;</a> is also growing rapidly and provides a growth platform for .Net development platform, Microsoft&#8217;s Windows Server, Active Directory, and SQL Server database products.</p><p>Microsoft has an army of loyal developers who love its easy-to-use tools, and it is rumored that it&#8217;s <a target="_blank" href="http://www.crn.com/news/mobility/300072056/sources-microsoft-in-talks-to-acquire-mobile-app-development-startup-xamarin.htm">going to acquire Xamarin</a>, which lets Microsoft .Net developers build apps for iOS and Android. The companies recently <a target="_blank" href="http://blog.xamarin.com/microsoft-and-xamarin-partner-globally/">signed a partnership</a>, but an acquisition of this technology would be a huge step forward for Microsoft&#8217;s new mission of platform agnosticism.</p><h2><strong>So what of Windows?</strong></h2><p>Microsoft is not giving up on Windows, but it is going to stop tying its growth products to only one operating system. Windows 8.1, for all of its faults, is the same as Windows 7 once you ignore the Modern UI. And on a tablet, the Modern UI actually works quite well. I have been using a Lenovo Yoga exclusively for almost a year and have actually quite enjoyed it despite its quirks. In addition, Windows Server is seeing a renaissance as part of Azure cloud.</p><p>There is a report that Microsoft is seriously considering <a target="_blank" href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/28/5456374/windows-8-1-with-bing-experiment">giving away a version of Windows 8.1</a>, much like Google gives away Android and Chrome OS in order to drive more Google Search revenue, and Apple now <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/22/apple-makes-os-x-mavericks-a-free-upgrade-available-today/">gives away Mac OS upgrades</a>.</p><p>Microsoft&#8217;s OEMs have been struggling to increase margin and have been <a target="_blank" href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/21/5435152/windows-8-1-license-fees-cut-by-70-percent-rumor">extracting lower Windows licensing fees</a> and even <a target="_blank" href="http://www.medianama.com/2014/03/223-microsoft-windows-phone-free-license-india/">no licensing fees in some cases</a>. However, these discounts could be used as a lever to finally get hardware OEMs into line with more stringent hardware standards.</p><p>With a free Windows on decent hardware and a $99 Office 365 home subscription, Microsoft can retain legions of value-oriented consumers (think Costco shoppers) that want to use the same computer at home that they use at work. While some urban Apple devotees may look with disdain on this strategy, there are many high growth, high profit companies that sell exclusively to middle America.</p><p>The saving grace for Windows Phone is that at some point, the apps market is going to calm down, and there will be 1,000 apps that matter to 99 percent of the population. Microsoft can pay each of those app developers up to $500,000 to port to Windows Phone, so it would cost $500 million for Microsoft to offer a phone that has the top 1,000 apps. Quite achievable for a company that has a <a target="_blank" href="http://bgr.com/2013/11/01/microsoft-marketing-budget-2-5-billion-dollars/">$2.5 billion annual marketing budget</a> and more than $100 billion of cash. The much-maligned Surface tablet is now a break-even business with almost $1 billion in sales. Even if consumers don&#8217;t buy them, Microsoft is <a target="_blank" href="http://news.delta.com/index.php?s=43&amp;item=2118">selling large volumes to businesses such as Delta</a>.</p><p>The operating system story for Microsoft is now one of slow growth and middling progress, which keeps it somewhat in the game without bogging down its application growth engines.</p><h2><strong>The other businesses</strong></h2><p>As many an analyst has stated, the Xbox and Bing businesses should be spun out. One option is to sell Xbox to troubled Sony so it can combine the declining consoles market into a single larger entity and gain efficiencies in production and retain AAA game developers. Yahoo could pick up Bing in order to accelerate its <a target="_blank" href="http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/11/technology/yahoo-mayer/">renewed focus on search</a>.</p><p>Perhaps I have a tendency to favor the underdog, but Nadella has a great shot to make Microsoft relevant again with its new focus on selling its high-growth software to businesses on whatever platform they want. There was a time in the early 1990s when Microsoft made more money on every Mac sold than Apple did. With its new platform-agnostic strategy, this is a metric that Microsoft could attain again for every device sold to a business.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-resurgent-post-windows-microsoft.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-4318765514058568390Sat, 15 Mar 2014 19:17:00 +00002014-03-16T12:17:46.354-07:00Why Can't a Startup Build a Self-Driving Car?<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/why-cant-a-startup-build-a-self-driving-car/"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XXLY9GBg-c0/Uf1qN8XnkqI/AAAAAAAAAog/1WLOrSNyR_c/s1600/tc-techcrunch.png" /></a><br /><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/why-cant-a-startup-build-a-self-driving-car/">This post was also published on TechCrunch.</a><p/><center><img width="500" border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1ojshd1zCKs/UyX4dCATCOI/AAAAAAAAAt0/yZ83PGkcsXw/s1600/car.jpg" /></center> <p>On a 10- to 20-year horizon, large-scale technological innovation is going to center around machine intelligence, robotics and sensors. Each of these fields requires gargantuan amounts of capital and a lot of patience, a combination well beyond the scope of even the most progressive venture capital firm.</p><p>As Google has demonstrated with its self-driving car, the combination of machine intelligence, robotics and sensors can already perform better than a human at a complex task such as driving a car, something that 10 years ago was unthinkable to most people.</p><p>No doubt, Tesla has built an amazing car and after much trial and tribulation, brought it to market. However, General Motors had already shipped a production electric car years before. Tesla took advantage of the innovator&#8217;s dilemma, where legacy car companies are virtually incapable of embracing electric-only cars and integrating modern electronics.</p><p>Tesla&#8217;s roadmap includes &#8220;autopilot&#8221; and eventually &#8220;autonomous&#8221; features. Perhaps Tesla also will deliver these features slightly before legacy car manufacturers do, including Mercedes and Lexus, which are aggressively adding similar features. But the winner in this game is Google, which has a multi-year technology lead and can extract enormous licensing fees.</p><p>The amount of raw computing horsepower necessary for cognitive computing is massive. Integrating next-generation sensors such as LIDAR is extremely complicated. The regulatory environment for introducing smart machines is extremely unpredictable, and the required experimentation and unpredictable timelines of this type of work puts it squarely in the &#8220;research&#8221; side of research and development. And venture capitalists inherently hate research &#8211; they like development.</p><p>Even the biggest venture-backed play in machine intelligence, DeepMind, with $50 million in very patient funding and 75 top researchers on staff, was recently <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/">acquired by Google for $500 million</a>. Google has been on a massive buying spree lately, snapping up the building blocks of future technology with robotics acquisitions, other <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/09/facebook-artificial-intelligence-lab-lecun/">AI acquisitions such as DNNresearch</a>, and key <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/14/ray-kurzweil-joins-google-as-engineering-director-focusing-on-machine-learning-and-language-tech/">hires such as Ray Kurzweil</a>, who is considered by many to be the godfather of commercial cognitive computing. <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/23/d-wave-ceo-quantum-computing-vern-brownell-interview/">Google is among the only customers of D-Wave</a>, a much-maligned quantum-computing company.</p><p>Companies like Google, IBM and Microsoft have been building out machine-learning teams that can leverage their investments in vast networks of computers built around the globe. The amount of transistors needed to match the number of neurons in a human brain is a tremendous 100 billion, and it will take us until around 2025 to replicate on a computer chip, according to Kurzweil, although this might be aggressive due to the physics around increasingly smaller transistors in microchips.</p><p>The market uptake of machine intelligence is going to take a while. IBM has shown that a computer can outperform humans at chess and Jeopardy, and is transitioning its cognitive computing work into fields such as medicine. Even at the scale of an IBM, shareholders are complaining about the cost of this transition and the <a target="_blank" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/28/watson-heads-departure-raises-questions-about-ibm-moonshot/">head of the Watson group was recently replaced</a>. If IBM&#8217;s Watson were a startup, its investors would have long ago forced it to sell so that they could put their capital into more efficient short-term and mid-term investments.</p><p>Other companies with large computing grids are starting to get into the game. Facebook recently kicked off an artificial intelligence lab with the <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/09/facebook-artificial-intelligence-lab-lecun/">hire of Yann LeCun from NYU</a>, and also <a target="_blank" href="http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/12/facebook-acquires-speech-recognition-and-translation-company-to-connect-the-rest-of-the-world/">acquired speech recognition company Mobile Technologies</a>. EBay hired <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/09/eyeing-expansion-in-brics-ebay-doubles-down-on-machine-learning-and-context-translation/">Hassan Sawaf from SAIC</a> to spearhead its machine-intelligence efforts. Yahoo! has spun a <a target="_blank" href="http://recode.net/2014/02/12/yahoo-strikes-10m-research-deal-with-carnegie-mellon/">deal with Carnegie Mellon</a> to access their researchers. Apple, with its relentless focus on the client side of computing, is struggling to keep up with making its email systems scalable, let alone keep its Siri acquisition on par with Google&#8217;s relentless drive towards machine intelligence.</p><p>The upside is huge. Every sector of the economy will soon enough have its own version of a self-driving car, even fields as advanced as medicine. As anyone with an undiagnosed or somewhat diagnosed medical condition can tell you, the amount of guesswork and over specialization of medical professionals is maddening. A computer can take a holistic approach and quickly narrow down what a problem could be, and iterate with exclusionary tests. Given the fundamental shift required, it will take quite a while for this transition to happen in fields such as medicine.</p><p>Despite <a target="_blank" href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm">repeated</a> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/silicon-valleys-youth-problem.html">fears</a>, startups are definitely taking on far bigger challenges than just photo and chat apps. But will startups be able to compete with these giants in areas such as machine intelligence? Perhaps Google, IBM and Amazon will offer Cognition-as-a-Service that would usher in a wave of new companies, much like Amazon&#8217;s Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering reignited the web.</p><p>IBM has created a $100 million investment fund for Watson-based companies and just <a target="_blank" href="http://recode.net/2014/02/12/first-investment-by-ibms-watson-fund-is-for-welltok/">made its first investment</a>. Amazon could kickstart a cognition service by acquiring nascent cognition service companies such as Wise.io, Expect Labs, and BigML and offering them at scale. Now that would unleash a generation of &#8220;smart&#8221; startups.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2014/03/why-cant-startup-build-self-driving-car.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-4819510798092498064Fri, 21 Feb 2014 18:39:00 +00002014-02-22T22:42:56.273-08:00Mobile Contacts Are Now The Real Social Network<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/mobile-contacts-are-now-the-real-social-network/"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XXLY9GBg-c0/Uf1qN8XnkqI/AAAAAAAAAog/1WLOrSNyR_c/s1600/tc-techcrunch.png" /></a><br /><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/mobile-contacts-are-now-the-real-social-network/">This post was also published on TechCrunch.</a><p/><center><img width="500" border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rfWtsLcnZYc/Uwec7PoeyoI/AAAAAAAAAtg/wyx68RiG2aU/s1600/shutterstock_173525351.jpg" /></center> <p>Facebook&#8217;s <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/facebook-buying-whatsapp-for-16b-in-cash-and-stock-plus-3b-in-rsus/">surprising acquisition</a> of WhatsApp signals that it has realized that users&#8217; true social network is the contact list on their smartphones. Mobile contacts are usually limited to people a user knows well and actually communicates with, a veritable treasure trove when compared to the copious list of Facebook friends that many users have accumulated over the years.</p> <p>Adding someone to your phone is more intimate than friending them on Facebook. And messaging someone through their phone number is much more intimate than a Facebook message, something that Mark Zuckerberg himself says is <a target="_blank" href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/2099560/with-whatsapp-facebook-aims-for-immediacy.html">akin to informal e-mail</a>. Facebook had the opportunity to own the social graph for new apps with Facebook Platform, which spawned multiple successful companies such as Pinterest that used the &#8220;follow all my Facebook friends&#8221; feature to build their own social networks.</p> <p>Threatened by the emerging networks, Facebook decided to clamp down on new &#8220;competitive&#8221; social networking apps, and <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/my-precious-social-graph/">turned off access to its social graph</a> for emerging messaging apps like Voxer and Vine.</p> <p>Without access to the Facebook social graph, the new generation of mobile communication apps such as Snapchat and Secret use mobile contacts exclusively to build connections between users.</p> <p>Younger and <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/facebook-whatsapp/">international users</a> are particularly attracted to the mobile contact as the defining criteria of their true social network. As Path&#8217;s struggles have shown, attempting to force an intimate social network with the same real-name mechanism as Facebook does not work.</p> <table style="width:100%;" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="6"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><strong>Social Network</strong></td><td valign="top"><strong>Identity</strong></td><td valign="top"><strong>Who It&#8217;s For</strong></td></tr><tr><td valign="top">Facebook</td><td valign="top">Real Name</td><td valign="top">Casual acquaintances</td></tr><tr><td valign="top">Instagram</td><td valign="top">Alias</td><td valign="top">Aspirational following</td></tr><tr><td valign="top">WhatsApp</td><td valign="top">Phone Number</td><td valign="top">Actual friends</td></tr></tbody></table> <p>Facebook had already acquired the ability to have a unilateral, aspirational follow capability akin to Twitter with its Instagram acquisition. WhatsApp offers a social network of 450 million users that are intimately connected with each other by phone numbers.</p> <p>With this acquisition, Facebook now controls the intersection of all three kinds of social graphs: casual acquaintances, aspirational following, and intimate relationships. And that&#8217;s worth quite a premium.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2014/02/mobile-contacts-are-now-real-social.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-521351860972265415Sun, 19 Jan 2014 19:00:00 +00002014-01-26T21:25:13.825-08:00Why The Big Picture Matters on Mobile<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/19/why-the-big-picture-matters-on-mobile/"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/TAil87OOncI/AAAAAAAAAPs/3kdYjex8A_E/s400/venture+beat+logo.png" border=0><br />This post was also published in VentureBeat.</a> <p>Chances are you’ve checked out Instagram, Tinder, Whisper or Snapchat within the last hour. Or maybe the last five minutes. They are some of the most popular and addicting consumer mobile apps today. And they have a remarkably consistent user interface: a big picture with an accompanying line of text.</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NywvsrURUcw/UuXsIHC66uI/AAAAAAAAAsw/yXDTUmTtB0g/s1600/yared-1.jpg" /></center> <p>Research indicates that <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=V8cwjrHgQFEC&amp;pg=PA35&amp;lpg=PA35&amp;d" target="_blank">reading is actually quite difficult</a> for the human brain, which from the start evolved to capture and process mountains of information visually. The narrowing of information delivery instigated by text messaging and Twitter has trained users to communicate efficiently with fewer words. The paucity of text has allowed imagery to take over on the mobile form factor, as evidenced by the most popular new apps.</p> <p>The attention-focusing layout of a big picture with accompanying line of text originated with the newspaper front page. Above the fold layouts were used for big events such as wars, royal weddings, and big sporting events. Or, in the case of The New York Post, every day.</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3YqlRH9J96Y/UuXss_8_EwI/AAAAAAAAAtA/otEasqbUZfw/s1600/yared-2.jpg" /></center> <p>This treatment first emerged on the web with memes such as LOLcat and has subsequently infiltrated every aspect of the Internet.</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dMUkexmgCqU/UuXss9PX9RI/AAAAAAAAAs8/Bjc7ZkgP2cc/s1600/yared-3.jpg" /></center> <p>The picture with accompanying line of text trend has become so pervasive that Whisper, a popular app for anonymously sharing thoughts, automatically suggests somewhat contextually-relevant images for the user to pick from. The thoughts without imagery are actually somewhat hokey. Adding imagery makes them seem somewhat deeper, as Saturday Night Live showcased with its popular Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey interstitials:</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k2nxfrtJUns/UuXssywmvcI/AAAAAAAAAs4/M40ZiKQB4cc/s1600/yared-4.jpg" /></center> <p>Facebook and Twitter are including larger images in newsfeeds to accompany a short line of text, and newer apps like Circle and Jelly are combining the Flipboard-style text overlay on each image in a newsfeed, a look that Facebook and Twitter will likely also soon implement.</p> <center><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YK8DS6nKaG8/UuXstSrTgNI/AAAAAAAAAtQ/tKSILXomrQU/s1600/yared-5.jpg" /></center> Snapchat even allows messaging with hand drawn additions. </p> <p>Perhaps in the next phase of this evolution, there won’t even be a line of text at all. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. </p> <p>The only saving grace for the written word in 2014 may be the strong growth of Ev William’s long-form oriented <a href="https://medium.com/" target="_blank">Medium</a>. While short-form communication continues to accelerate, a contra-trend of long-form content may materialize as well. </p> <p>In our increasingly polarized, bifurcated world, there likely will not be much room for anything in between.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2014/01/why-big-picture-matters-on-mobile.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-5008012852877771593Fri, 22 Nov 2013 23:21:00 +00002014-02-21T14:27:26.462-08:00Email Is Now Just Another Stream<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/email-is-now-just-another-stream/"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XXLY9GBg-c0/Uf1qN8XnkqI/AAAAAAAAAog/1WLOrSNyR_c/s1600/tc-techcrunch.png" /></a><br /><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/03/won-the-seo-wars-google-has/">This post was also published on TechCrunch.</a><p>Only a couple of years ago, pundits were predicting an end to email. But instead of fading away, there&#8217;s been ever-increasing email volume and usage. Rather than being replaced by Facebook and Twitter streams, email is actually becoming a stream itself.</p><p>Mail systems are evolving to match the new volume of email, and users will increasingly see only algorithmically vetted emails. Some other emails may be shown below the vetted email, and the rest will flow away into temporal oblivion, just like uninteresting social posts from a few hours ago.</p><p><center><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qcw0w-c4s_I/UsNRk6hlijI/AAAAAAAAAsg/wjBjQg934xE/s1600/streams4.png" /></center></p><p>Implications for marketers are significant. The days of the average AOL or Yahoo! mail user scrolling through every email in their inbox are rapidly fading. Email has been especially important in e-commerce sales and customer re-engagement. For e-commerce in particular, <a target="_blank" href="http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/16/social-commerce-email/">email marketing</a> exceeds the performance of social advertising. Large-volume email senders will need to make a greater effort to send emails that are both personalized and interesting to the recipient.</p><p>The email tsunami problem is pervasive. Several Silicon Valley folks have already committed the unfortunately termed &#8220;email suicide,&#8221; where they give up on reading unread email and start anew. Others are adding email auto-responders stating that they will not necessarily see email. New vendors such as SendGrid have helped bring on the deluge by dramatically lowering the price of sending volume email and democratizing access with simplified onboarding and easy developer APIs.</p><p>Google has added several features to Gmail in an attempt to add some order to the chaos of email. The changes will effect both email users and marketers. With Gmail features like <a target="_blank" href="http://lifehacker.com/5992588/gmails-priority-inbox-is-awesome-just-give-it-a-chance">Priority Inbox</a>, <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/29/gmail-for-desktop-and-mobile-gets-a-new-inbox-now-automatically-categorizes-your-email/">Gmail Tabs</a>, and <a target="_blank" href="https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1734792?hl=en">Circles</a>, users are increasingly engaging only with algorithmically vetted email from senders they know. Priority Inbox is only a satisfactory product and needs to evolve to automatically mark as &#8220;important&#8221; email from senders that a recipient repeatedly opens, especially if the recipient replies. Next-generation email clients like <a target="_blank" href="http://inky.com/">Inky</a> go as far as sorting email by relevance rather than date.</p><p>For marketers, sending a ton of email without any user engagement will soon become counterproductive. For each type of volume sender, a new balance will have to be found between sending numerous emails and still achieving desired &#8220;open rates&#8221; and &#8220;clickthroughs&#8221; &#8212; mechanisms by which an email provider like Google can detect whether or not the email is of interest to a user. Much like how &#8220;edge rank&#8221; increases for Facebook posts when the people like, share or comment on it, &#8220;mail rank&#8221; will be an increasingly important benchmark for email marketers to measure their effectiveness.</p><p>At CBS Interactive, we send over 200 million emails a month, ranging from news summaries to personalized fantasy sports updates, to an audience of 270 million unique users. We have corporate standards and systems to ensure that recipients can easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails. However, given these upcoming changes, we will need to look at overall open rates from a particular property and begin to proactively prune users that have no interest in emails we send.</p><p>The shift to email as a stream will have personal implications as well. People may have to be introduced via a mutual party rather than sending a cold email, especially if the sender has sent numerous emails that have not entailed or received a response. Even personal emails from people you know may soon be treated like a Facebook or Twitter post, where a user either immediately responds, such as with a Facebook like or comment, or instead lets it flow into the ether. Much like social posts, senders will likely shift toward keeping email messages short and to the point.</p><p>Facebook and Twitter both have nascent but unique takes on messaging. Facebook messages that are not from one of your friends go into an &#8220;other&#8221; folder that is rarely read. Twitter direct messages can only be sent to people who follow the sender, although Twitter is <a target="_blank" href="http://allthingsd.com/20131017/twitter-plans-to-revamp-its-private-messaging-product/?mod=atd_homepage_carousel">experimenting with opening this up a bit</a>.</p><p>Stream-oriented companies like Facebook and Twitter essentially charge brands to target their own customers by allowing brands to purchase promoted posts for their fans and followers. Email providers may soon sell &#8220;promoted emails&#8221; where a marketer can target a user in their priority inbox. Users may revolt, but in the end they are getting email for free, so it will be hard to complain. Email has become a stream, and as the adage goes, when you&#8217;re not paying, you&#8217;re the product.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2013/11/email-is-now-just-another-stream.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-2341829752975227033Sat, 24 Aug 2013 17:00:00 +00002014-06-15T20:22:02.112-07:00Rebooting the Bay Bridge: A Classic Rewrite Story<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/24/rebooting-the-bay-bridge-a-classic-rewrite-story/"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/TAil87OOncI/AAAAAAAAAPs/3kdYjex8A_E/s400/venture+beat+logo.png" border=0><br />This post was written with Mathew Spolin and published in VentureBeat.</a> <p/><center><img border="0" width="600" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Mfm6RlmPLUI/U55hozn8xOI/AAAAAAAAAvQ/kVr7j_z_oqE/s1600/bay1.jpg" /></center> <p>From the smallest startup to the largest multi-national company, the ground-up software rewrite is the unicorn of organizations. At some point, a software system needs to be rewritten from scratch, usually for one or more of three reasons:</p><ol><li>Architectural flaws inherent from the onset.</li><li>External market conditions that the software can not meet.</li><li>Too much deferred maintenance such that the software is unstable and unchangeable.</li></ol><p dir="ltr">Software is sometimes hard to understand as it is abstract. However, we have the ultimate physical, real-life rewrite on our doorstep here in San Francisco: the rebuild of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge.</p><h3>Architectural Flaws</h3> <center><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fi2mosNuyDE/U55ho5BVsbI/AAAAAAAAAv0/S-rJKwy5hcI/s1600/bay2.jpg" /></center> <p>The eastern span of the Bay Bridge, first opened in 1936, had a significant architectural flaw in that it could not survive a high-magnitude earthquake. The magnitude 7 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 caused a 76- by 50-foot section of the upper deck to collapse onto the lower deck. There was a single fatality on the bridge and the bridge was out of commission for a month, from October 17 to November 18.</p> <p>Sometimes software hits an architectural wall, and has to be rewritten. The current mobile and tablet phenomena has caused many traditionally web-only companies to substantially overhaul their software in order to deliver their service to mobile devices.</p> <h3>The Technically Obvious “Rewrite” Proposal</h3> <center><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m0lP4TbEfyY/U55ho7o0jtI/AAAAAAAAAvM/scY2scb0VAU/s1600/bay3.png" /></center> <p>Bridges are hard to build, and the more complicated the bridge, the more complicated and expensive the construction project. The existing eastern span of the bay bridge was nothing fancy, and could be replaced relatively easily by a modern, economical skyway at a cost of $1.1 billion.</p><p dir="ltr">When proposing a rewrite of software, things may seem simple at first, and engineers and managers think that they can rip out a new version relatively quickly.</p> <h3>The Rewrite Maelstrom</h3> <center><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oK6_42SkeQQ/U55hpEYmymI/AAAAAAAAAvU/jg-Joie-_-g/s1600/bay4.jpg" /></center> <p>Although there was a simple alternative, there are lots of stakeholders who couldn’t get what they wanted from the existing bridge and wanted to put their imprint on the new bridge. Jerry Brown, then the mayor of Oakland, demanded that the new bridge be a “statement bridge” since Oakland deserved a modern suspension bridge on par with what San Francisco has with the Western span of the Bay Bridge. Biking advocates demanded a bike lane, even though there is not much to do on Yurba Buena and Treasure Island and the Western span of the bridge doesn’t have a bike lane. Everyone settled on a self-anchored suspension bridge, a type of bridge design that had never been attempted at the scale of the Bay Bridge.</p> <p>Even though the Governor at the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, attempted to override everyone and go back to the simpler skyway design, there were so many people and factions involved that eventually the more extensive design was greenlit.</p> <p>When rewriting software, it is important to consider that there are many people that are stakeholders in the existing solution, and likely have pent up requirements that they were not able to solve with the existing solution that they would now finally like to be addressed with the new solution. It is also extremely difficult to remove features as people expect a new solution to improve on their current solution. This type of requirements creep is all very normal and should be expected, and needs to be addressed well as it can lead to a significant amount of analysis, sometimes paralysis, and a lot of change management.</p> <h3>Agreement Challenges</h3> <center><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8hTL9P9gV0g/U55hpQPgGXI/AAAAAAAAAvk/41rnlh2NIbw/s1600/bay5.png" /></center> <p>Even once a new design and its features are agreed upon, there will likely be additional disagreements. In the Bay Bridge’s case, Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco and Mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland, bickered over whether to put the new bridge to the North or South of the existing bridge. Brown wanted the new bridge placed to the South of the current bridge in order for its shadow to not decrease the value of prime real estate on Yurba Buena Island. Even the Navy was involved, since it was transferring the land to San Francisco, and wouldn’t let Caltrans test the soil at the site. The disagreement dragged on for two years and added hundreds of millions of cost to the project.</p> <p>When rewriting software, it should be expected that there will be disagreements, so it is critical that all the stakeholders meet regularly, keep the overall project goals in mind, and have the ability to engage in frank and open dialog in order to address issues.</p> <h3>Unforeseen Problems, Delays and Cost</h3> <p>The Bay Bridge had numerous delays and cost overruns, ranging from bad welds due to welders being rushed to bad bolts that the manufacturer changed specifications on after they were initially tested.</p> <p>During all the debate about what type of bridge to build, and exactly where to build the bridge, China’s building boom began consuming all available concrete and steel, driving up prices. The delays in the Bay Bridge construction ended up costing billions of dollars. The state and local agencies haggled constantly on who would pay for overruns, leading to toll increases and debt. The simple design was estimated to cost $1.1 billion, and the bridge ended up costing $6.3 billion and was delivered years late, with some potential flaws.</p><p>In large, complicated projects, unfortunately it should be expected that there are going to be unforeseen problems and delays, in even the most padded schedule. It is a fact of life of engineering and time and cost overruns are unfortunately very typical of large projects. In addition, these types of delays can cause endless thrash in organizations as people expected the new solution and deferred maintenance and features on the existing solution.</p> <h3>Finally, a New Bridge!</h3> <center><img border="0" width="600" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NdjQKmLBjkE/U55hpnaa4OI/AAAAAAAAAvg/gTez3X_v5so/s1600/bay6.jpg" /></center> <p>I have learned the hard way, unfortunately more than once, that rewrites are an incredibly painful process. They may initially seem simple, but end up taking far more time, money and coordination than initially envisioned. However, on the other side of the process, you end up with a brand spanking new bridge, ready for the future.</p> <p>For more on the Bay Bridge project, see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_the_San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland_Bay_Bridge" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a> and <a href="http://baybridgeinfo.org/" target="_blank">BayBridgeInfo.org</a>.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2013/08/rebooting-bay-bridge-classic-rewrite.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-5469139115030148362Thu, 22 Aug 2013 17:28:00 +00002013-08-22T10:28:38.483-07:00How to Sell to the CIO, Part 3: Closing the Deal<a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/08/22/how-to-sell-to-the-cio-closing-the-deal/"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Lb4r8c2TCuQ/UUQ8GOyDA7I/AAAAAAAAAno/Dnrot1mDrr4/s1600/wsj.jpeg" border=0><br />This post was published in the Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal.</a><p><p>After almost two decades of selling enterprise infrastructure to IT organizations, I have spent the last two years on the other side of the table as the CIO/CTO of CBS Interactive. This is part three of a three part series on how to sell to CIOs.</p><p>In part one, <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/08/08/how-to-sell-to-the-cio-the-initial-pitch/">I provided tips for getting into an account</a> and in part two <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/08/15/how-to-sell-to-the-cio-the-sales-process/">I discussed how to navigate the sales process</a>. Now it’s time to close the deal.</p><p><h3>Timing</h3></p><p>Deals are going to take as long as they take, and there is really not much a vendor can do to make all the stars align within a big enterprise. A sophisticated vendor understands that large enterprises have a lot of processes in place to close deals and an aversion to new vendors. There is generally no shortcut through legal, finance and other internal approvals.</p><p>When a vendor asks for deviations so that they can make a number or close the deal in Q4 as they promised the board, it makes them seem weak and engenders doubt. It leads everyone internally to ask, “Are they really so desperate that our $150K is a make or break for them?”</p><p>While there’s no way to tactfully ask for a deal to get expedited, a vendor should understand a company’s process and track that the deal is going well. We had a deal with VMware Inc. that slid for two quarters for various reasons. They were so patient and diligent that in the end, <em>we</em> took <em>them</em> out to dinner.</p><p><h3>Pricing</h3></p><p>Sometimes vendors agree to a price range at the beginning of a sales process and then change the price when it’s time to close. Agreeing to terms during contract iteration and then shifting parameters around and returning something completely different for each subsequent iteration makes a vendor look untrustworthy and unreliable. We once got very far along with a vendor, showed them how to pitch to our business units, had everyone lined up to switch to this vendor, and then they started playing tactics like this and we walked away.</p><p>When the reasons behind pricing are not clearly communicated, the vendor gets blamed. We once requested a tiered price instead of a flat fee for a deal to access segmentation information ad hoc. It was a reasonable request that the vendor accommodated, but unfortunately a rumor spread through our organization that we were paying by the impression to access our own data. The pricing was so customized that we had a hard time getting buy-in. As word of the pricing debacle spread, it reflected poorly on the company. So if the pricing model is customized in order to close the deal, be sure that it is very clear why this is the case and that the information is disseminated widely.</p><p>Deals always seem to get hung up on indemnification. While everyone seems to know where a deal will end up, it often takes weeks of back-and-forth between legal and a couple of ultimatums to close. If I ever run a software company again, I will be sure to have two pricing tiers: greater indemnification at a higher price, less indemnification at a lower price. You pick, and we all save ourselves a big headache.</p><p><h3>Reputation Matters</h3></p><p>The biggest surprise I had upon running a large IT organization is the level of information sharing and collaboration between CIOs at different companies, particularly about vendors. Most CIOs and IT VPs are all very accessible, candid, and frank with each other about what products they are using, how the vendors are doing, and how they make internal decisions.</p><p>Vendors should be aware that their performance quickly makes the rounds, both in a particular vertical and across different verticals. This type of diligence accelerates as more players across finance and legal get involved in a deal. “I heard they completely screwed up at Company X” will kill a deal even if it is on the verge of signing. Vendors need to make sure that they have happy customers.</p><p>In addition, executives often transition between companies in a vertical such as media or finance. One of my biggest internal stakeholders for a video platform had a bad experience with a potential vendor at his previous company &#8212; a cable channel without a large video-streaming offering. The vendor CEO’s reasoned that the previous company was small, and that we would be treated a lot differently as a large customer. Wrong answer. A much better approach would have been to figure out exactly what went wrong at the previous account, remediate it, or at least offer a “lessons learned” on how they have improved service.</p><p>Reputation is also important globally. If a vendor does a global deal with a company but doesn’t provide good service to the satellite locations, the international offices will go out and find their own vendor, causing a lot of thrash throughout the company. A global deal is not done until it’s delivered well internationally.</p><p><h3>Account Management</h3></p><p>Once a deal looks like it is about to be signed, there is typically a hand off to account management. A lot of vendors fail at this step. Salespeople need to be incented to ensure that there is a clean handoff. Vendors would also be wise to ensure a single account management point of contact, especially for larger organizations. Handing us an organizational chart with different contacts for professional services, technical issues, and billing makes us feel like we are not getting what we paid for.</p><p>And finally, a note of caution about growing organically within an organization: Although it can look like a vendor has traction because they are used in multiple departments, they can still be replaced. For example, in the cloud file-sharing segment, we were running Dropbox Inc., Box Inc., Google Inc.&#8217;s Google Drive, and others. When it became clear that we needed one official cloud storage vendor, our corporate IT folks took all the vendors through a rigorous process and picked a single vendor. Soon after, the other vendors were blocked at the firewall level. To stay relevant, a vendor should stay ahead of the customer with new features, provide excellent service, and be proactive if there is downtime or failures.</p><p><h3>Sell to Yourself</h3></p><p>The best thing a vendor can do is have staff who are domain experts at what they are selling and also staff who have worked in a decision-making capacity within enterprise IT. Sometimes that’s not possible, so I’ve shared my experiences to give vendors the inside look on how enterprise IT makes purchasing decisions and how to optimize time for everyone involved. A clear, straightforward pitch, a salient case for how your product will help the customer, and a good deal of patience go a long way when it comes to selling to the CIO.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-to-sell-to-cio-part-3-closing-deal.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-8264962930597093876Fri, 16 Aug 2013 06:13:00 +00002013-08-15T23:13:52.647-07:00How to Sell to the CIO, Part 2: The Sales Process<a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/08/15/how-to-sell-to-the-cio-the-sales-process/"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Lb4r8c2TCuQ/UUQ8GOyDA7I/AAAAAAAAAno/Dnrot1mDrr4/s1600/wsj.jpeg" border=0><br />This post was published in the Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal.</a><p><p>After almost two decades of selling enterprise infrastructure to IT organizations, I have spent the last two years on the other side of the table as the CIO/CTO of CBS Interactive. This is the second of a three part series on how to sell to CIOs.</p><p><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/08/08/how-to-sell-to-the-cio-the-initial-pitch/">The tips I laid out in part one</a> helped you get into an account. But getting the meeting is just the beginning. Now it’s time to sell your product.</p><p><h3>Sell the ROI</h3></p><p>The question enterprise IT has for the salesperson during a sales meeting is, “Will your product save or make us money and does it have low risk?” As Founder and CEO of Upstream Group Doug Weaver writes, “They’re not thinking about helping you out or what kind of day you’re having. ‘What’s in it for me?’ is the order of the day.”</p><p>A vendor needs to have a very clear and verifiable return on investment (ROI) story with measurable metrics. There are times when companies buy software or services without evaluating ROI, such as during the e-commerce push in the dot-com boom and the social craze of the past couple of years, but these are the exceptions.</p><p>An ROI story should use the right numbers. I have experienced several instances where vendors offer ROI examples that don’t add up. For example, a database-as-a-service solution that is deployed on-premises and is pitched as cheaper than Amazon.com Inc.’s Relational Database Service. The comparison leaves out the cost of the database administrators needed to run the solution <em>on premises</em>. Also, many vendors don’t take into account the difference between capital expense and operating expense, a distinction that should always be included in ROI calculations.</p><p>There is generally a significant transition and maintenance cost to adopt new technology that IT organizations consider before starting a new vendor relationship. Numerous vendors have pitched us on “reporting in the cloud,” but never consider the cost of copying vast volumes of our data to their system or the compliance and regulatory headache that comes with having our proprietary data in their hands. The reporting features need to be <em>more</em>than an on-premises solution for us to even entertain the concept.</p><p><h3>Product Fit</h3></p><p>It is critical for vendors selling a product to an enterprise to have people with domain expertise on their team.</p><p>Vendors should be very careful about “vaporware,” products that are announced but not yet implemented. For example, once a vendor showed screenshots and demonstrations of their product working in a certain way, but when we trialed the solution, we found that the software was missing several key features. The vendor then acknowledged that the features would be coming out in six months. Unfortunately, after wasting my team’s time, we will not give them another chance any time soon.</p><p>While it’s important to cater to the customer, make sure other enterprises also need a product feature before adding every feature a company requests. One approach for vendors is to have a blanket policy that three customers must request the same feature before it is implemented (but be careful when wielding that stick as customers often do talk to each other). There are, of course, certain products that inherently need to be customized and should include a set amount of professional services. Finding the right balance will result in a product fit that works for both the vendor and the customer.</p><p><h3>Go to the Right Person</h3></p>To sell to an IT organization, convince the person who actually has the problem. When someone three levels down in my organization comes running into my office and proclaims that they found a great product that pays for itself in six months, will save us money, and that they have already trialed it and it works well, there’s a great chance that deal is going to get done.</p><p>Get the attention of the database manager, the networking director, the system administration manager, the procurement director or whoever is the appropriate person and convince them to try the product. The best way to sell to people on the software side is to have a product that they can find, deploy and use on their own without needing to talk to anyone at the vendor.</p><p>MySQL’s Marten Mickos perfected this strategy with his “15 minutes to delight” philosophy, previously unthinkable for a product like a database. Subsequent products from Atlassian Inc., New Relic and Splunk have adopted this business model, and their growth reflects this philosophy’s focus on delivering a killer product.</p><p>Once a product has already been tested, the sales process becomes much smoother. Vendors can direct their salespeople to focus on learning the organization and helping to navigate finance, legal and stakeholders’ agendas to ensure that required features are added to the roadmap. Once a product sells itself, the sales organization doesn’t waste time chasing down leads and requesting face-to-face meetings.</p><p>This advice does not apply to companies selling deep workflow solutions like order management software that requires a lot of analysis, buy-in from multiple stakeholders and has a long implementation time. These types of solutions still require “traditional” sales techniques and cycles. The best way to close a deal like this done is to understand that it will take a long time and to identify an executive champion that will help push it through.</p><p>I will explain more about how to close a deal in the final part of this guide on selling to the CIO.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-to-sell-to-cio-part-2-sales-process.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-6380164314975677948Fri, 09 Aug 2013 02:35:00 +00002013-08-08T19:36:39.680-07:00How to Sell to the CIO, Part 1: The Initial Pitch<a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/08/08/how-to-sell-to-the-cio-the-initial-pitch/"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Lb4r8c2TCuQ/UUQ8GOyDA7I/AAAAAAAAAno/Dnrot1mDrr4/s1600/wsj.jpeg" border=0><br />This post was published in the Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal.</a><p><p>After almost two decades of selling business infrastructure to technology companies, I thought I knew it all. But since spending the last two years on the other side of the table as the CIO/CTO of CBS Interactive, I realized how much I didn’t know about selling to enterprise IT.</p><p>The way to truly understand how and why an enterprise purchases technology is by gaining the ability to understand how IT departments at medium to large-size organizations work, how decision-making actually happens and how vendors can avoid getting in their own way.</p><p>Based on my experience on both sides, the following guide aims to help salespeople and companies become more efficient for both their clients and themselves.</p><p><h3>Be clear what it is you do</h3></p><p>A pitch, whether from a small startup or a multinational corporation, should always concisely state the following:</p><p>1. Description: What the offering specifically does, how it’s different from competitors and how it can help a CIO. Ideally this includes some tangibles, such as screenshots or performance graphs.</p><p>2. Validation: What stage the product is at and who else is using it.</p><p>3. Process: How can the offering be purchased, what the typical on-ramp looks like, and how much it costs.</p><p>Here’s a mock example of a good pitch:</p><p><em>Super Interconnect provides a next generation fiber interconnect that is 10x the speed of existing interconnects. Super Interconnect makes it possible for your web and application servers to quickly access backend resources such as databases, thereby significantly reducing latency to customers. As you can see in the attached graph, we offer 25x the price/performance of 10gigE, and are a year ahead of other nextgen fiber interconnect technologies.</em></p><p><em>Super Interconnect is a young company, however we all come from networking companies such as Cisco and Juniper, and are well funded by top venture capitalist firms Accel and Sequoia. A few of your peers such as PepsiCo and Walt Disney Company are actively using Super Interconnect and can serve as references.</em></p><p><em>We sell our product direct to IT organization and can work through your preferred resellers. A typical POC takes 30 days to deploy with minimal time by your staff. Super Interconnect is priced at $1K/server, a 300% significant $/gbps savings over 10gigE.”</em></p><p>If an introductory pitch can’t cover this basic information, IT professionals will get the sense that a meeting will likely be painful and will want to avoid it.</p><p>Also, if a company is new and doesn’t have a product yet, it’s best for the vendor to be honest and say that they are in a research phase. Instead of polling a number of CIOs, vendors might consider finding and collaborating with a domain expert that knows the next thing an enterprise will need. Hype and vision won’t sell.</p><p><h3>Time is not the answer</h3></p><p>Virtually every contact a CIO receives has the same ask: for a meeting or phone call. As most CIOs&#8217; schedules are crammed, realize that coffee, lunch, drinks, dinner and events are particularly tough requests. So instead of asking for the CIO, who is not even the best decision-maker on a lot of new technology, vendors should ask to talk to the right experts in a CIO’s organization.</p><p>For startups in particular, sales and business development executives love to have big brand names and titles in their pipeline. Even when it is clear that a product is not a fit, they still push hard for a meeting in order to justify their own value to their management chain. This can reflect badly on a startup, so salespeople need to work to find the right targets and measure success not by the amount of meetings, but by how many prospects are moving into the next step in the sales funnel.</p><p><h3>Bypassing IT is not realistic</h3></p><p>Selling directly to a line of business and bypassing IT is not realistic. IT is generally with the program, supportive of cloud applications and no longer a roadblock like in years past. And lines of business need to have their tools integrated with their company’s overarching systems as well as be in compliance with security and Sarbanes-Oxley policies.</p><p>Treating the IT department like a speedbump signals that the vendor does not value what IT thinks. Lines of business typically partner with IT, and a deal takes agreement between the two.</p><p><h3>Understand the IT culture</h3></p><p>While IT vendors spend their time trying to sell to IT departments, they rarely have anyone on staff that has actually worked in an IT department. IT departments have a certain culture and the best way to sell to them is to understand how they work.</p><p>When a vendor secures a meeting, it’s in their interest to show up early, be on their best behavior, dress and act professionally and make sure not to reschedule unless a significant life event occurs. Once a vendor has the attention of IT management, they should tell it like it is and then try to close a deal. There are quite a few vendors that don’t answer direct questions regarding features and pricing.</p><p>Startup companies need to make sure to spend more time talking about how their passion is solving a customer’s problem, than about how their idea is “awesome.” The history of the company and its various pivots can be interesting, but only within the context of how excited the founders are to solve a business problem for a customer.</p><p><h3>Getting feedback</h3></p><p>IT managers are generally loathe to give any feedback since it usually engenders hostility. Quite often, what a vendor is selling is not a good fit for a particular enterprise. Particularly for startup founders, learning this can be quite emotional. It is important for founders to contain that emotion and try to learn exactly how a product needs to shift in order to meet the needs of an enterprise customer.</p><p>The best way to get feedback is to ask specific questions. For example: What is it that the customer likes and doesn’t like about their current solution? How hard would it be to move to a new solution? And is it realistic that the customer would move to a new solution or will they simply wait for their existing vendor to add the missing features?</p><p><h3>The flip side</h3></p><p>Enterprise IT is guilty of wasting vendors’ time in order to learn what’s going on in the industry and to keep options open. A question I used to ask when I was on the vendor side of the table was, “What’s the last product you bought and what was the process like?” If no one can answer, the IT group is clearly very conservative and a vendor should come back in a year after they have found and closed some early adopters.</p><p>In the next part of “How to Sell to the CIO,” I will discuss the sales process.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-to-sell-to-cio-part-1-initial-pitch.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-8627759837424250456Sat, 03 Aug 2013 20:38:00 +00002013-08-03T13:40:36.742-07:00In Mastering Machine Intelligence, Google Rewrites Search Engine Rules<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/03/won-the-seo-wars-google-has/"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XXLY9GBg-c0/Uf1qN8XnkqI/AAAAAAAAAog/1WLOrSNyR_c/s1600/tc-techcrunch.png" /></a><br /><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/03/won-the-seo-wars-google-has/">This post was written with Cameron Olthius and published on TechCrunch.</a><p/><p>Google has produced a car that drives itself and an Android operating system that has remarkably good speech recognition. Yes, Google has begun to master machine intelligence. So it should be no surprise that Google has finally started to figure out how to stop bad actors from gaming its crown jewel – the Google search engine. We say <i>finally</i> because it’s something Google has always talked about, but, until recently, has never actually been able to do.</p><p>With the improved search engine, SEO experts will have to learn a new playbook if they want to stay in the game.</p><center><p><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tDUIxEFzM6Y/Uf1qc-DaAyI/AAAAAAAAAoo/6D3dlFz9Kdo/s1600/glevers.jpg" /></p></center><p></p><h3>SEO Wars</h3><p>In January 2011, there was a groundswell of user complaints <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/why-we-desperately-need-a-new-and-better-google-2/">kicked off by Vivek Wadwa</a> about Google’s search results being subpar and gamed by black hat SEO experts, people who use questionable techniques to improve search-engine results. By exploiting weaknesses in Google’s search algorithms, these characters made search less helpful for all of us.</p><p>We have been tracking the issue for a while. Back in 2007, we wrote about Americans experiencing “search engine fatigue,” as advertisers found ways to “game the system” so that their content appeared first in search results (<a target="_blank" href="http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2007/10/its-official-search-sucks.html">read more here</a>). And in 2009, we wrote about Google’s shift to <a target="_blank" href="http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2009/12/googles-vertical-search.html">providing “answers,” such as maps results and weather</a> above search results.</p><p>Even the shift to answers was not enough to end Google’s ongoing war with SEO experts. As we describe in this <a target="_blank" href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57358850-93/why-google-is-ditching-search/">CNET article from early 2012</a>, it turns out that answers were even easier to monetize than ads. This was one of the reasons Google has increasingly turned to socially curated links.</p><p>In the past couple of years, Google has deployed a wave of algorithm updates, including Panda and Panda 2, Penguin, as well as updates to existing mechanisms such as Quality Deserved Freshness. In addition, Google made it harder to figure out what keywords people are using when they search.</p><p>The onslaught of algorithm updates has effectively made it increasingly more difficult for a host of black hat SEO techniques &#8212; such as duplicative content, link farming and keyword stuffing &#8212; to work. This doesn’t mean those techniques won’t work. One look into a query like “payday loans” or ‘‘viagra” proves they still do. But these techniques are now more query-dependent, meaning that Google has essentially given a pass for certain verticals that are naturally more overwhelmed with spam. But for the most part, using “SEO magic” to build a content site is no longer a viable long-term strategy.</p><h3>The New Rules Of SEO</h3><p>So is SEO over? Far from it. SEO is as important as ever. Understanding Google&#8217;s policies and not running afoul of them is critical to maintaining placement on Google search results.</p><p>With these latest changes, SEO experts will now need to have a deep understanding of the various reasons a site can inadvertently be punished by Google and how best to create solutions needed to fix the issues, or avoid them altogether.</p><p>Here’s what SEO experts need to focus on now:</p><p><strong>Clean, well-structured site architecture.</strong> Sites should be easy to use and navigate, employ clean URL structures that make hierarchical sense, properly link internally, and have all pages, sections and categories properly labeled and tagged.</p><p><strong>Usable Pages.</strong> Pages should be simple, clear, provide unique value, and meet the average user’s reason for coming to the page. Google wants to serve up results that will satisfy a user’s search intent. It does not want to serve up results that users will visit, click the back button, and select the next result.</p><p><strong>Interesting content.</strong> Pages need to have more than straight facts that Google can answer above the search results, so a page needs to show more than the weather or a sports score.</p><p><strong>No hidden content.</strong> Google sometimes thinks that hidden content is meant to game the system. So be very careful about handling hidden items that users can toggle on and off or creative pagination.</p><p><strong>Good mobile experience.</strong> Google now penalizes sites that do not have a clean, speedy and presentable mobile experience. Sites need to stop delivering desktop web pages to mobile devices.</p><p><strong>Duplicate content.</strong> When you think of duplicate content you probably think of content copied from one page or site to another, but that&#8217;s not the only form. Things like a URL resolving using various parameters, printable pages, and canonical issues can often create duplicate content issues that harm a site.</p><p><strong> Markup.</strong> Rich snippets and structured data markup will help Google better understand content, as well as help users understand what’s on a page and why it’s relevant to their query, which can result in higher click-through rates.</p><p>Google chasing down and excluding content from bad actors is a huge opportunity for web content creators. Creating great content and working with SEO professionals from inception through maintenance can produce amazing results. Some of our sites have even doubled in Google traffic over the past 12 months.</p><p>So don’t think of Google’s changes as another offensive in the ongoing SEO battles. If played correctly, everyone will be better off now.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2013/08/in-mastering-machine-intelligence.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-4769802040637600795Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:18:00 +00002013-03-16T02:32:48.175-07:00To Cloud or Not to Cloud<a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/03/11/to-cloud-or-not-to-cloud/"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Lb4r8c2TCuQ/UUQ8GOyDA7I/AAAAAAAAAno/Dnrot1mDrr4/s1600/wsj.jpeg" border=0><br />This post was published in the Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal.</a><p>Cloud is all the rage in IT right now, offering nearly instantaneous time to value, continual feature upgrades, and reduced cost. However, it is important to delineate different types of cloud offerings and what should and shouldn’t run in the cloud. There are also several contractual issues CIOs should consider when dealing with cloud vendor. </p><p><h3>Software-as-a-Service is mainstream and cost-effective</h3></p><p>Among the very first cloud offerings, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions such as Salesforce.com Inc. and ServiceNow Inc. are very compelling. The offerings are completely self-contained, turnkey and offer rich feature sets that are continually enhanced and refined by the vendor. Often SaaS vendors integrate with each other which makes it easier to piece a stack of software together. </p><p>When selecting a SaaS vendor, CIOs should ensure that the vendor has a high standard of data security and offers an interface by which data can be retrieved into internal systems. Lines of business have a tendency to start using SaaS vendors on their own, and savings and compliance can be realized by rolling up several of these point purchases into a global deal with a single vendor. An interesting new tool from Skyhigh Networks can monitor what SaaS tools are being accessed from a company’s network in order to facilitate discovery of SaaS usage. </p><p>Legacy enterprise software vendors such as IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG are increasingly acquiring SaaS companies in order to continue their growth beyond traditional packaged software. After such acquisitions, pricing typically increases two to three times, so in order to have a predictable experience when engaging a SaaS vendor, a CIO should consider singing multi-year deals with a set yearly increase and exit options. </p><p><h3>Infrastructure-as-a-Service is great, but expensive</h3></p><p>Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings such as Amazon Web Services are a convenient method to elastically expand your data center without buying new equipment. Amazon.com Inc. provides security features such as Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) which segregates your network traffic and allows access via a secured virtual private network (VPN). In addition Amazon provides Direct Connect which offers point-to-point access to your Amazon infrastructure. </p><p>The elasticity and self-service features of infrastructure-as-a-service make it easy for internal customers to add machines instantly without waiting for machines to be ordered, racked, and kick-started. Additional machines can be added for heightened traffic due to large events or seasonality. </p><p>In order to build out an IaaS service, it is important to lock down security with features such as VPC and VPN. From a compliance perspective, it is important to have a clear policy of what can and can’t be run on the IaaS, as well as a plan to move systems off of the IaaS and back into a data center within a set amount of time in case the systems need to be moved back due to a security breach or legal issue. </p><p>The downside of IaaS is the price. Pricing can be complicated in terms of figuring out how many and what type of instances are needed, and whether or not to use reserved instances with a time commitment that are cheaper. At CBS Interactive, we have a director of cloudarchitecture that assists business units with this type of decision making, and we continually monitor the aggregate Amazon charges in order to maintain efficiency. </p><p>IaaS charges are completely operating expense, and cannot be depreciated as a capital expense as is normally the case when purchasing hardware for a data center. When I first started using Amazon Web Services in their private beta a decade ago, after 25 or so instances it was cheaper to run your own hardware. Now that number is 200 or so instances. However, the total cost comparison should include the business agility offered to internal customers in terms of easily spinning up new machines. </p><p><h3>Private clouds are emerging</h3></p><p>At CBS Interactive, we host a large number of websites ranging from CBS.com to CNET to Last.fm. We are currently building out a private cloud in one of our main data centers where internal customers will benefit from CapEx amortization and have the agility of an IaaS provider. At that point, what to run where will become a simple math equation since system administration will be comparable between our IaaS and our private cloud. </p><p>Private clouds are difficult to implement, however, as they require cobbling together vendors that offer self-service provisioning, load balancing, storage access, and database administration that leverage the existing networking and system infrastructure in a data center. </p><p><h3>Hybrid clouds are not realistic for existing applications</h3></p><p>Many vendors claim that hybrid clouds offer elasticity without having to move systems into a SaaS or PaaS environment. In my experience, this is not a realistic alternative. Applications that can run in a hybrid cloud are specifically designed to be split across different data centers and architectures. </p><p>Taking a legacy application and running parts of it outside of a data center with a cloud provider requires that incoming requests into that application are load balanced across the two, that data access from the cloud version to the source system is available without latency, and that some data is synchronized between the two in such a way that the application performs as expected. The amount of work to accomplish all of this on an existing legacy application typically far exceeds the benefits of elasticity. </p><p><h3>Platform-as-a-Service has too much lock-in</h3></p><p>Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings such as Google Inc.’s AppCloud, Heroku Microsoft Corp. ’s Azure, and Amazon Beanstalk offer the ability to drop in code modules without having to worry about features such as load balancing, scaling, user management, and database management and tuning. </p><p>While they are typically not appropriate for legacy applications, these services offer incredibly fast time to value for new applications. However, PaaS platforms are like Hotel California – it’s easy to get in and hard to leave, as the application is heavily locked into the PaaS vendor and cannot be easily moved without significant re-engineering. </p><p>If the application needs to be moved due to a compliance or legal reason, or it has grown so much that it is exorbitantly expensive to run on a PaaS, organizations can find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. PaaS is therefore much more suited for smaller organizations, and only applicable to larger organizations that have a strongly defined PaaS policy in place on what proprietary PaaS services may be used in order to ease a transition out of the PaaS. </p><p>In addition, given Heroku’s recent metrics issues, it is important that independent measuring be put into place to ensure that the PaaS system is performing as promised. </p><p><h3>Features-as-a-Service require too much access to internal systems</h3></p><p>I am of course using the term feature-as-a-service in jest. There is currently a rash of analytics, Big Data, and mobile enablement vendors pitching the enterprise with a cloud-based approach and promising the simplicity of a SaaS solution. </p><p>However, virtually all of these solutions require that either the enterprise continually copies mountains of data into the vendor’s cloud systems, or that the enterprise allow deep vendor access into internal systems such as databases. Either option causes innumerable security and compliance headaches. </p><p>Some of the vendors are beginning to shift, either only targeting the SMB market, or adding a traditional on-premise option for their software. Another emerging option is to have the vendor deploy their solution within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, thereby accessing secure enterprise data within that cloud, but without compromising security or compliance. </p><p>Perhaps data oriented features-as-a-service will be more viable if an enterprise’s data shifts to the cloud onto the new breed of systems such as Amazon’s RedShift data warehouse. In the meantime, the benefits of a feature-of-a-service cloud offering rarely outweigh the compliance and data cost of onboarding the vendor. </p><p><h3>To Cloud or not to Cloud</h3></p><p>There are different types of cloud solutions, different types of applications suited to the cloud, and different levels of comfort with an enterprise to move systems to the cloud. It is important to evaluate each cloud option with a well-formulated approach that looks at the overall benefit, cost, exposure and includes an extraction evaluation to avoid lock in. Cloud on! </p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2013/03/to-cloud-or-not-to-cloud.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-6476399503229726988Fri, 11 Jan 2013 19:00:00 +00002013-01-23T00:47:06.642-08:00Android Challenges the iPhone in Every Category<a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57563527-37/android-challenges-the-iphone-in-every-category/"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7CGXnr0rRXg/TqournIy00I/AAAAAAAAAeA/5Nos_zJiWBE/s400/cnet-logo.jpg" border=0></a><a href="http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/11/android-phones-vs-iphone-5/"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/TAil87OOncI/AAAAAAAAAPs/3kdYjex8A_E/s400/venture+beat+logo.png" border=0></a><br /><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57563527-37/android-challenges-the-iphone-in-every-category/">This post was also published on CNET and VentureBeat.</a><p><h3>The new breed of Android devices exceeds the iPhone 5 in every way, including hardware, operating system, and apps.</h3></p><p><center><img border="0" height="266" width="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KdgNKAiVz_g/UP-io9_3FtI/AAAAAAAAAnA/cHbxh97HHuc/s400/droid-dna-5.jpg" /></center></p><p>For the past month, I have been using an <a href="http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/htc-droid-dna-verizon/4505-6452_7-35536642.html">HTC Droid DNA</a>, which has similar specs to the rumored upcoming Samsung Galaxy S4. People approach me at grocery stores, airports, coffee shops, even on the street and ask me about the phone. The device is indeed quite compelling, even from a distance. </p><p>The HTC DNA has an amazingly bright 1080p HD display with a higher resolution than <a href="http://www.cnet.com/iphone-5/">Apple's iPhone 5 Retina</a> display. The operating system is modern with dynamic widgets that tell you at a glance what's going on. The apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and such are equivalent to those available to iOS, and Google Apps such as Google Now, voice recognition, and Google Maps are sleek and modern. This is hands down a better device than the iPhone 5, and people seem to intuitively recognize it. </p><p>What phone would I recommend for my mom? An iPhone. It's safe, predictable, and uniform. What would I recommend for anyone under 40? Definitely one of the new breeds of <a href="http://reviews.cnet.com/best-android-phones/" section="luke_topic" > Android phones</a>. Android might still be a bit quirkier than an iPhone, but it's definitely not confusing for people who interact daily with a variety of advanced technology. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-Srun5jd5A">Samsung really nailed it in its commercial</a> where a young woman is waiting in line for a new iPhone and it turns out she is holding the spot for her parents. </p><p>The new breed of Android devices exceed the iPhone 5 in every category -- hardware, operating system, and apps. </p><p><h3>The spec is alive and well -- and killing Apple</h3></p><p>Hardware from Samsung, HTC, LG, and others has now caught up and eclipsed Apple's devices. Smartphones don't really have that many specs to evaluate, and each of the specs actually means something tangible to an average consumer. After five years of advanced smartphones, specs like screen size, screen density, screen brightness, camera speed, camera megapixels, physical dimensions, physical weight, amount of memory, and battery life are easily understandable and relevant to even the average smartphone consumer. Even specs like the number of processor cores and speed that are typically not easy to understand are easily understood when framed as "faster than the iPhone 5." </p><p>Conversely, the spec is definitely irrelevant when purchasing Apple products. There are so few products to choose from that decision making is essentially boiled down to a Goldilocks-style small/medium/large decision mainly driven by cost rather than actual features. While this is great for my mom and <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/14/rip-spec/">MG Siegler,</a> the lack of spec-based decision making is not necessarily a good thing in a world where consumers actually understand each of the specs and would like to choose how to balance them out relative to cost. Apple has been a follower on many specs, particularly in terms of form factors, trailing the market in both 4-inch phones and 7-inch <a href="http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/" section="luke_topic"> tablets</a>. </p><p>iPhones are definitely gorgeous devices, but they are relatively uniform and monotone. <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57511293-37/apple-iphone-5-early-reactions-from-around-the-web/">Aluminum is definitely great</a>. Conversely, I was surprised by how many women commented on the red accents on the HTC DNA, which are part of the DNA's crossbranding with Beats Audio. People like colors and variety, and they don't necessarily like having to completely cover a phone's shell and make it bulkier in order to express themselves. </p><p>Let's not forget that all of those Samsung Galaxy phones you see cost the same as an iPhone -- their owners are not bargain shoppers; they are spec and style shoppers. </p><p><h3>The screen should actually show you something!</h3></p><p>As mobile app developer <a href="http://www.rottmann.net/2013/01/an-iphone-lovers-confession-i-switched-to-the-nexus-4-completely/">Ralf Rottmann recently noted,</a> the new generation of Android 4 Jelly Bean is a fundamentally better operating system than iOS -- better rendering, better cross-app sharing, better app/OS integration, and more polished.</p><p> But the real standout for Android is the customizability of the display. Rather than iOS static icons with embedded notifications, with Android, apps are front and center, displaying the time in different time zones, the weather, appointments, emails, texts, whatever you want in numerous themes that can completely reinvent the user interface. </p><p>Windows Phone 8, the dark horse in this race, is actually even more integrated, with a unified messaging interface that consolidates emails, texts, and Facebook messages into a single thread, and a consistent tile interface with which apps can display information on the home screens. </p><p> The operating system is not as important as the apps, and this is where Android is beginning to shine. </p><p><h3>The cloud behind the app is more important than the app</h3></p><p>In a world where the hardware and operating system have become commoditized, the apps are the differentiator, and more and more, the apps are a viewport into a cloud service driven by machine learning.</p><p> The vast majority of Internet users rely on Google Search, Maps, YouTube, Mail, and such, and spend more time in those apps than in the mobile operating system itself. As <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20121229/2012-the-year-i-basically-stopped-using-apples-ios-apps/">people</a> are beginning to note, <a href="http://gigaom.com/apple/googles-big-push-to-make-better-ios-apps-than-apple/">Google's apps are way better than Apple's</a>. What good is Siri if it thinks <a href="http://newsle.com/article/0/53307226/">"Hurricane Sandy" is a hockey team</a>, when Google knows what's actually going on? Google Now is adding ambient awareness to Android devices, letting people know what's going on around them and what they need to do in a very personal way, with features like a notice that you need to leave for your next meeting because <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-now-better-than-siri-2012-7">there is now traffic en route</a>. </p><p>Perhaps, as is rumored off and on, Apple will start snapping up cloud services such as <a href="/8301-13579_3-57561865-37/apple-and-waze-not-happening-after-all/">Waze.</a> However, it is hard to buy and integrate a new type of product category into a large company that doesn't have it in its DNA. Competing with Google, an entrenched, <a href="http://readwrite.com/2012/12/27/google-2012-the-machines-are-getting-smarter">dominant player in machine intelligence</a> that recently added <a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/kurzweil-joins-google-to-work-on-new-projects-involving-machine-learning-and-language-processing">Ray Kurzweil</a> to its roster is going to be a challenging affair. Microsoft actually had a better track record of delivering large-scale cloud services, such as mail, mapping, and storage, than Apple. </p><p>Beyond Google's apps, the reality of the app market is that all of the applications that matter are now on Android, and it actually will soon have <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/04/google-play-will-hit-a-million-apps-in-2013-probably-sooner-than-the-ios-app-store/">more apps than iOS</a>. Dan Lyons of ReadWrite is lambasting the Silicon Valley tech press for <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/01/04/android-now-outshines-ios-in-almost-every-aspect">living in an iPhone echo chamber</a>, and he does have a point. Pundits are lauding Google Maps features on their iPhones that have been available on Android devices for literally years. Bloggers breathlessly reveal new Facebook iPhone app features such as "<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/24/friendshake-facebooks-new-mobile-feature-for-finding-people-nearby-and-a-highlight-killer/">Find Friends Nearby</a>" that had been available for over a month on Android. </p><p>The feedback loop of the echo chamber is that developers initially develop apps on iOS, much like the recently popular Cinemagram. However, developers like Rottmann like cool devices, and are starting to shift over to Android. In addition, developers are feeling limited by iOS user interface patterns and its <a href="http://branch.com/b/has-skeuomorphic-design-reached-its-sell-by-date">skeuomorphic apps</a> and are <a href="http://gigaom.com/apple/mobile-designers-no-longer-see-apple-on-the-forefront-of-ios-design/">branching out</a>. Like the Mac OS of the early '90s, the consistent UI across applications will likely splinter. </p><p>The numbers speak for themselves. Android has a <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57544131-94/android-beats-ios-5-to-1-in-q3-smartphone-market-share/">75 percent smartphone worldwide market share</a>, as evidenced by the hordes of Samsung devices in use throughout Europe and Asia. While <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/04/old-phones-and-new-users-are-key-reasons-apple-topped-50-u-s-smartphone-market-share/">Apple is regaining market share</a> in the U.S. with the iPhone 5, it is about to face an onslaught of 5-inch Android phones with specs that far exceed the iPhone 5's. Wall Street clearly sees a shift coming, and has <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/electronics/9725956/Apple-suffers-worst-share-price-fall-in-four-years-as-35bn-wiped-off-tech-giant.html">hammered Apple's stock price</a> over the past quarter. </p><p>The average consumer has moved past the days of pious, scruffy haired, unshaven, thick glasses-wearing dudes lecturing us on how Apple is so cool. Perhaps soon Silicon Valley will catch up. When you see someone in a cafe with a MacBook Air, iPad, and iPhone on the table in front of them, is "Think Different" really what comes to mind? </p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2013/01/android-challenges-iphone-in-every.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-8659140313859454531Wed, 02 Jan 2013 18:00:00 +00002013-01-03T13:30:44.521-08:002013: The Internet of Things, Delivered via Smartphone<a href="http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/02/internet-of-things-via-smartphone/"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/TAil87OOncI/AAAAAAAAAPs/3kdYjex8A_E/s400/venture+beat+logo.png" border=0><br />This post was also published in VentureBeat.</a> <p>Virtually every electronic device has now gained a smartphone controlled equivalent over the past year. The well known products in this category, such as the <a href="http://www.nest.com/" target="_blank">Nest thermostat</a> and <a href="http://www.sonos.com/" target="_blank">Sonos music system</a>, have now been joined with smartphone controlled <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/29/light-show-anyone-apple-stores-start-stocking-199-philips-hue-custom-led-light-kits/">light bulbs</a>, <a href="http://allthingsd.com/20121002/new-lockitron-the-keyless-lock-will-message-your-iphone-when-someone-knocks/" target="_blank">door locks</a>, <a href="http://gigaom.com/2012/11/21/are-you-ready-for-appliances-that-are-smarter-than-you/" target="_blank">refrigerators</a>, <a href="http://www.alarm.com/productservices/mobileapps/mobile-apps.aspx" target="_blank">security systems</a>, <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/214423/turn_your_smartphone_into_your_home_theater_remote_control.html" target="_blank">home theater remote controls,</a> <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/28/the-deanbeat-ouya-keeps-the-ball-rolling/">game consoles</a>, <a href="http://www.phonearena.com/news/Fitbit-Aria-Wi-Fi-Smart-Scale-works-with-your-smartphone-to-motivate-you-to-lose-weight_id29389" target="_blank">weight scales</a>, and even <a href="http://www.brianhpratt.net/cms/index.php?page=roomote" target="_blank">vacuum cleaners</a>. Services such as <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/17/uberconference-ios-android-apps/">teleconference systems</a> that used to be controlled just by touch tones are now controllable by smartphones. There are even smart device powered <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/18/double-turns-the-ipad-into-a-telepresence-robot/" target="_blank">telepresence robots</a>.</p> <p>Historically, these types of devices had unintuitive control panels, small, hidden buttons, and other such complex interfaces. The smartphone ecosystem makes is easy for manufacturers to deliver mobile apps as control systems, and for users to intuitively control devices by using a familiar interface.</p> <p><center><img border="0" height="225" width="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WMrwmPUATBQ/UOU8vpVy2rI/AAAAAAAAAmo/tuLRZm3rASc/s400/the-internet-of-things-moves-a-step-closer-with-open-source-ultra-low-power-jennet-ip.jpg" /></center></p> <h3>The tech underneath it all</h3> <p>This device revolution has been powered by a new generation of cheap, embedded controllers, where full web-enabled systems can be cheaply embedded into a device. Consumer versions such as Arduino and the Rasberry Pi have kicked off a generation of controllable devices that even include do it yourself smartphone controlled <a href="http://www.newbound.com/site/powerstrip.html" target="_blank">power strips</a>.</p> <p>One quagmire that many users run into is that it can be hard to add a device to a home network and then connect a smartphone to the device. It can sometimes takes a while for a smartphone to find and log into a home Wi-Fi network. Sonos solves this problem by broadcasting over your network and letting users push a button to pair devices together. New peer-to-peer wireless protocols such as <a href="http://www.wi-fi.org/discover-and-learn/wi-fi-direct" target="_blank">Wi-Fi Direct</a> are attempting to address this problem in a more seamless manner.</p> <p>There is a definite threat that hackers can gain control of a home network, and thereby control all of the devices in a home, so it is important that users secure their WiFi with a password and a high level of encryption.</p> <p>This new era of control by smartphones is actually quite cheaper than legacy electronic controls. For example, both a legacy <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Leviton-HCM10-1DW-Scene-Capable-Single-Pole-Receiver/dp/B000U3HZYG/" target="_blank">“smarthome” lightswitch</a> and an <a href="http://www.nomorerack.com/daily_deals/view/172476-kocaso_mid_google_android_4_0_1_2ghz_4gb_7__tablet_pc" target="_blank">overstock 7” Android tablet</a> each cost $70. iPads are far cheaper and more usable than state-of-the-art systems such as Crestron.</p> <p>Touchscreens are not applicable to every dedicated device. My personal experience waiting for clerks to use iPad enabled point of sale terminals has not been positive. For whatever reason, it seems to take about twice as long for items to be entered and a receipt printed than with old-school push button registers.</p><h3>Where is this going next?</h3> <p>A very interesting facet of this next generation of devices is their ability to add ambient awareness to devices. Just like the Nest thermostat learns your comings and goings and the FitBit monitors your activity level, all of these devices will be soon be able to monitor their surroundings and fetch information like the current weather for their location.</p> <p>Google Now is currently providing this for Android users. Hobbyists have had a boon tinkering with the Xbox Kinect to add ambient awareness to their projects, and this type of technology is likely to be embedded in numerous devices in the near future.</p> <p>Another area that may soon feel the impact of smartphone interfaces is vehicles. There have been quite a few attempts at vehicle touch interfaces, with a large level of investment, from manufacturers including Ford with its <a href="http://cnettv.cnet.com/new-myford-interface/9742-1_53-50115155.html" target="_blank">MyTouch panel</a>, Tesla with its <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-33200_3-57322693-290/teslas-dream-screen-the-car-dashboard-of-the-future/" target="_blank">huge 17” panel</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDnO1mF1ops" target="_blank">Audi’s Multimedia Interface</a>. While these interfaces are functional, they are not familiar to users that expect iOS and Android style touch interfaces.</p> <p>In the near future, vehicle manufacturers will likely be pairing up more with software vendors, much like Ford partnered with Microsoft for its <a href="http://www.ford.com/technology/sync/" target="_blank">Sync voice recognition system</a>. Imagine a day when you can add the iOS or Android control panel as an option when purchasing a vehicle.</p> <p>It is likely that every room of a home will have a 4” or 7” smart device mounted as a control panel for lights, music, and more. Soon, “flipping a light switch” will sound as archaic as “dialing a telephone”.</p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2013/01/2013-internet-of-things-delivered-via.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-3440430810936545331Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:00:00 +00002012-11-10T14:27:34.556-08:00Zynga is Vastly Undervalued<a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57541275-235/why-zynga-is-vastly-undervalued/"><img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7CGXnr0rRXg/TqournIy00I/AAAAAAAAAeA/5Nos_zJiWBE/s400/cnet-logo.jpg" border=0></a><a href="http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/26/zynga-is-vastly-undervalued/"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mffT8gZJdAQ/TAil87OOncI/AAAAAAAAAPs/3kdYjex8A_E/s400/venture+beat+logo.png" border=0></a><br /><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57541275-235/why-zynga-is-vastly-undervalued/">This post was also published on CNET and VentureBeat.</a><p><center><img border="0" height="293" width="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-l05shu9s8O0/UJ7UjNW3huI/AAAAAAAAAmM/v8jhyTXW-OY/s400/zynga-poker-1.jpg" /></center></p><p>Zynga's stock has been in a freefall since its initial public offering, and the tech pundits and press have been looking on with schadenfreude as it continues to drop. Zynga is now worth essentially nothing: Its market capitalization of $1.82 billion is roughly equal to the value of its cash and real estate holdings, even with this week's announcements of real money gambling and a <a href="/8301-1023_3-57539445-93/zynga-loses-$52.7-million-in-q3-announces-stock-buyback/">$200 million stock buyback</a>. </p><p>How can a company that brings in $1.2 billion a year, and recently cut costs in order to achieve profitability, be worth nothing? </p><p>It doesn't make sense. Here's <a href="/8301-1023_3-57540355-93/facebook-execs-zynga-is-down-but-it-will-snap-back/">why Zynga is undervalued</a> -- provided it does the right thing next. </p><p>Zynga is sitting on three widely known and popular potential gaming franchises: Farmville, Poker, and With Friends. Each of these titles is well-known, has broad distribution, and an audience at least willing to check out a new iteration on the franchise. For instance, <a href="/8301-1023_3-57506081-93/zynga-tries-to-resuscitate-virtual-farming-with-farmville-2/">Farmville 2</a> just garnered 50 million users shortly after its launch. And each of Zynga's potential franchises targets a different audience: Farmville for middle-aged women, Poker for middle-aged men, and With Friends for the lucrative under-30 market. </p><p>What Zynga needs to do is expand its franchise strategy. </p><p>The gaming industry, much like Hollywood, is all about franchises. It is easy to churn out another Spider-Man movie or Call of Duty title, because there is already an audience for the content, which is a huge part of the hurdle in terms of success. Once you have a guaranteed audience, you can focus on the content. </p><p>Rovio, the makers of the Angry Birds franchise, is worth a reported $9 billion. Angry Birds is a great, fun, casual game that has successfully implemented distribution onto emerging smartphone mobile platforms, but in many ways Angry Birds is simply the Tetris of this generation of computing. In effect, Angry Birds is a single-player, traditional game that doesn't leverage the social graph, multiuser gaming, and advanced graphics. It barely even takes advantage of touch screens. </p><p>Still, it's hugely profitable because Rovio has truly turned Angry Birds into a game franchise. Rovio has leveraged every possible gaming channel from iPhone to <a href="http://www.cnet.com/android-atlas/" section="luke_topic" >Android</a> to even the Google Chrome App Store, added Star Wars editions, and signed cross-industry deals for everything from stuffed toys and lunch boxes to theme parks. Before it came up with Angry Birds, Rovio had 51 failed titles. It is now promoting Bad Piggies, a new title that is actually a spinoff of its Angry Birds franchise. </p><p>Franchises are not necessarily a guaranteed result, as titles can run over budget and fail at the box office. However, from a business perspective, it is a lot better to get a 50 percent head start than to start fresh and roll the dice with new content. </p><p>It is easy to see Zynga as a pure-play social gaming company that is struggling to shift into mobile, while social gaming becomes increasingly difficult to monetize. Yes, social channels have dried up after Facebook's shift to Timeline stymied potentially viral news feed user acquisition (aka spam). And indeed the Zynga game playbook has gotten tired now that Facebook is no longer a new platform and expectations of game mechanics have matured. </p><p>But in reality, Zynga sits on three potential franchises, each of which could be huge. </p><p>Right now, Zynga's most popular titles are stuck in their existing channels. Farmville and Poker are only available for Facebook users. With Friends games are only available on mobile. Each of these titles could easily go cross-channel, to <a href="http://www.cnet.com/nintendo-wii.html" section="luke_topic" >Wii</a>, Xbox and <a href="http://www.cnet.com/ps3.html" section="luke_topic" >PlayStation</a>. Why not play Zynga Poker on Xbox Live? </p><p>Building deep, franchise-driven titles for multiple platforms takes time and investment. However, it is a proven monetization model. </p><p>In addition, Zynga's announcement this week of real-money gambling is also potentially lucrative, especially in context of its ability to deliver the gambling audience of its Zynga Poker gaming franchise. </p><p>The technology industry, particularly its intersection with Wall Street, can be very herdlike, and it is hard to shift the herd perspective on companies like Zynga that are in flux. Still, a herd mentality can be an opportunity for clever investors to make a bet against the crowd. </p><p>In the midst of writing this article, I was having dinner with a hedge fund manager in London, who usually invests in things like mines. He had just bought Zynga for his personal portfolio, despite the fact that Piper Jaffray, Credit Suisse, and BMO Capital all downgraded the stock. The pure hedge fund perspective is to bet against the market, especially when the market is not acting on fundamentals. </p><p>And while this hedge fund guy usually invests in physical mines, even he has noticed that Zynga is sitting on a potential gold mine -- one that is definitely worth a whole lot more than nothing. </p>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2012/10/zynga-is-vastly-undervalued.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9074287.post-1744212271451436300Tue, 18 Sep 2012 11:13:00 +00002012-09-18T04:13:43.927-07:00$AAPLCrazy retweets on this one <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p><a href="https://twitter.com/search/$AAPL">$AAPL</a> = <a href="https://twitter.com/search/$GOOG">$GOOG</a> + <a href="https://twitter.com/search/$MSFT">$MSFT</a> + <a href="https://twitter.com/search/$AMZN">$AMZN</a> + <a href="https://twitter.com/search/$FB">$FB</a> ($655B)</p>&mdash; Peter Yared (@peteryared) <a href="https://twitter.com/peteryared/status/247938357185880064" data-datetime="2012-09-18T06:01:25+00:00">September 18, 2012</a></blockquote><script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>http://peteryared.blogspot.com/2012/09/aapl.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Peter Yared)0